


Teen Wolf

by galadrieljones



Series: The Dead Season Universe [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Ancient Elves (Dragon Age), Arlathan, Boxing, Canon Divergent, Charming Solas, Coming of Age, Depression, Elvhenan, F/M, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, On-Again/Off-Again Relationship, Origin Story, Prequel, Solas backstory, Street Magic, Teen Angst, Teen Romance, Teen Solas, Teenage Rebellion, Teenagers, YA, Young Love, Young Solas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2018-09-01 11:55:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 24,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8623606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galadrieljones/pseuds/galadrieljones
Summary: A series of short stories centering around Solas as a teenager in Arlathan. His father long dead, Solas performs street magic and competes in bare knuckle boxing fights to support himself and his mother Leanathy, a kind recluse with a generous soul. Circumstances have forced Solas to grow up fast. Now, prone to boredom, restlessness, and general rebellion, Solas, trodden with guilt and familial duty, experiences life through a haze of black eyes and elfroot smoke. Lucky for him, however, there's Ghilan'nain.





	1. Black and Blue Make Purple

**Author's Note:**

> While these stories can certainly be read in stand-alone fashion, they can also be read as canon backstory for Solas as he appears in my Solavellan romance [The Dead Season](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/16972533).
> 
> Updates will be ongoing and erratic. If you have any specific prompts or requests for teen Solas, come find me on [tumblr](http://galadrieljones.tumblr.com/). :-)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The mean streets of Arlathan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

It was a blue sundown. He could usually be found at the center of the city, behind the Great Gate where he performed his penny magics. Crystal, cool. The city streets were loud, and everything smelled like beer. He was no one, and yet, so tall. He smoked constantly as if to daze his audience. Little groups moving in and out. A small boy tugged at his pant leg, once. Solas glanced down at him, a quiet smirk.

“Do you have anymore butterflies?” said the boy.

Solas, who’d been leaning against the weathered building for some time now, smiled and dropped down to one knee, a joint of elfroot pinched between two fingers. He held out his other hand, palm up. “Which do you prefer?” he said. “Purple, or purple?”

“Aren’t they the same?” said the boy.

Solas raised his eyebrows. “Only if you want them to be.” He took a long hit off the elfroot, held the smoke in his lungs for a long, long time. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a gold coin.

“That is a coin,” said the boy. “Not a butterfly.”

Solas exhaled, from the corner of his mouth. “Patience,” he said. There was a small crowd now, gathering. Four or five in a clump. He told the boy to open his hand, and he gave him the coin. “Make a fist,” he said, and he held out his own–bloodied and bandaged–to show him how. “See?” The little boy followed suit.

“Now,” said Solas, squinting at the child. “Purple, or purple?”

“Fire,” said the boy, a knowing grin. Catching on.

Solas laughed, the joint pressed between his lips. “Very good,” he said. Then, he nodded once, and stood as the boy opened his fist. The butterfly hopped out and flitted into the air. One small trinket of fire. The coin was gone. The crowd cheered.

But the boy, smiling, still asked after the coin. “What of it?” he said.

Solas flipped another from his pocket. The boy caught it with both hands. When he ran off, the crowd did, too, but not before leaving small pinches of gold in the square tin at his feet. He thanked them. Then, they were gone.

Solas caught the  butterfly on his knuckles, studied it as he smoked.

He was late to the knuckle fights, sighing, peering up at the cold, jeweled sky. He knew the girls would be there. As usual. Pristine, with their green satin umbrellas. Every single one of them. They bored him like most of the dreary fixtures in his life. A carousel of bland smiles, predictable pretty. One after the other.  But the they just liked it when he hurt his hands.

He dropped the joint, burned down to the nub, put it out with his foot and spat into the cobble. Then he collected his boon, left the tin, put his hands in his pockets to head for the Ring. At least it felt like something. The pain.


	2. Dazed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Ring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

The Ring was underground. You had to follow a long series of cold, glass steps until you hit the bottom. Everything was translucent. The masses, the drinks. Except for the vines, so meaty they extended like arms from the pitch black ceilings. Dripping, wet. The room was lit by fire and ice, two hundred people, maybe more, and the Ring itself–a trodden oval of grass and dirt, roped off, on a platform so all the comers could see.

Solas had taped off his hands and was leaning against a pillar, smoking as usual, and watching the fight. Eyes glazed, mouth dry, he was tired. His mother needed him back by morning to help with the garden. For her, morning was night. Sometimes, it went on forever. All guesswork, he’d make it when he could.

“You should smoke less,” said Ghil, fanning the smoke out of her eyes. They were old friends, from childhood. “You’re going to daze yourself.”

He sucked in the smoke, exhaled in a series of casual rings.

She rolled her eyes, watched him study the fight, his jaw flexing in cold calculation as he continued to ignore her. “Fine,” she muttered to herself. “It’s your face.”

When the loser went down, finally, Solas emptied his lungs and put his joint out on the pillar. “Watch,” he said to her, and then he gave her his eyes, momentarily. Long, warm, purple. He smirked, and crawled into the ring, ready.

The announcer called him the _Wolf._ Everybody did. The people cheered. The other guy was big, like a goddam barrel, probably older, too. But Solas was tall, and light. It’s hard to fight the tall ones. It’s hard to punch upward. Plus, tricky.

The other guy spat a bit of blood into the dirt. Solas just raised his eyebrows. He was measured. Stood with his hands in his pockets, a kind of unnerving calm until the bell rang and the people cheered.

The rules were simple. Magic was allowed, but in suggestion only. Absolutely nothing flashy, nothing visible to the crowd, and nothing used to physically impact your opponent. Most people didn’t even know what that meant, let alone how to wield such magic. Suggestion. How do you get someone to see exactly what you want them to see?

“Purple, or purple?” said Solas.

The other guy was on his toes now, fists up. This gave him pause. “What are you on about, Wolf?”

The crowd chanted. Solas smirked. “Nothing,” he said. He dropped his right hand from his pocket, hit the guy clean across the jaw, closed fist, spun him on his heels. He went down to his knees.

Solas grinned, pleased with himself. The crowd laughed. He glanced back at Ghil. Long, yellow hair unfolding–layer after layer, all the way down to her waist. He raised his eyebrows at her, awaiting her approval, but she just covered her face with her hands. The crowd gasped. Solas, confused, turned his head.

The other guy had come back. He was big, remember, and he cracked Solas square in the mouth, shook out his knuckles. Solas, surprised, staggered almost as far back as the ropes. The pain was bright, deep. Once he got his bearings, he felt around his mouth for loose teeth, spat a mouthful of blood into a tuft of grass at the edge of the Ring. Then he looked up into the pitch black ceiling and he huffed and clenched his fists and shook his jangled face, the adrenaline–clean and pure. Like ice. This was better anyway.

He smiled. He sought the man’s eyes–little green jewels–put his sights on him as he pushed off the ropes, and then he clamped down, focus, and with a nod, undid the space between them. _This_ was magic. A spell of Solas’s own invention. No one could else could fuck with your vision like that. The other guy, he saw double, and this was all it took. Stumbling around like a drunk, he took a wide, empty swing into the air.

Solas ducked, approached. “This is why they call me Fen’Harel,” he said. “Don’t forget.” He put the guy in the dirt with a single right hook. Moaning, he all but went to sleep. The crowd was silent for a moment. Solas tipped his thumb to the corner of his mouth, tasted the blood as he squinted around. He nodded once, then cheers. A crock of bickering, chatter and fire as money exchanged hands. The fight ended. The night at a close.

Before leaving the Ring, Solas got down on one knee. He rolled the guy onto his side. “You’re all right,” he said. He whipped a handkerchief from his back pocket, put it into the spent man’s hand.

The guy looked up, confused, his face puffed up like a pastry. “It’s cold?” he said of the handkerchief.

“I’m not a savage,” said Solas. “Keep it.” The man took it and pressed it to his swollen jaw.

Solas got up and crawled under the ropes, hopped out of the ring. Ghil handed him a flask of water. Solas drank, swished some around in his mouth, and spat, rusty, at his feet.

“That’s going to leave a bruise,” she said, touching a hand to his jaw, gingerly.

He flinched. “Leave it,” he said.

“Let me look.”

“Leave it.”

She sighed.

“You were right,” he said then, gulping the water, watching three separate men attempt to haul his incapacitated opponent out of the ring.

“About what?”

He peered down at her. He smiled. His face shiny with sweat, cut up and jagged, perfect. “I got dazed.”

“You heard me?”

“I always hear you, Ghilan’nain,” he said, rolling his shoulders back, closing his eyes. “I’m just not always listening.”

She sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. “Let’s go,” she said. “This place makes me feel broken.”

“I thought you liked it here,” said Solas, fussing with the linen wrappings on his hands. A couple of people pushed passed them. Nobody cared, not really. Nobody stopped to say hello. “What’s the matter? You’re not usually this dour.”

“I’m not dour,” she said, her eyes like windows. “I’m just bored.”

“Well, that makes two of us,” said Solas. “Where are the festivities tonight? Go grab the winnings. I’m all out of elfroot.”

“Shouldn’t you get home?” said Ghil. The room had begun to empty. Typical. Everywhere smelled like smoke and booze. The room was cool. It glittered. She held out her palms. He put the bloodied hand wraps inside them and sighed. 

“I’ll be home soon enough,” said Solas, spitting one last time into the weeds. “She’ll survive.”


	3. Grasping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

Outside, at the party. It was cold and loud. The stars were like teeth. Yellow and pink and red and silver. White in the sky. This house, it was sky high and huge, diamond spires and ten thousand windows. What a fucking joke. Solas, amused, leaned into a tree, watching the people and the bonfire. Ghil was there, too, sitting in the grass by his feet. She didn’t drink, but she smoked. She passed him the joint, and he took a long drag. It had been that kind of night. He’d got his face bashed in and won anyway. His nose, clipped. Ghil had staunched the bleeding with one cool wad of gauze, and now, he was merely bruised.

“We don’t have to stay,” she said, knees pulled up to her chest. Her hair was long like barley.

Solas finished off the joint and put it out in the tree bark. “There’s nothing better to do,” he said. “Not tonight anyway. I like the fresh air.”

“You would,” said Ghil.

Then a girl came over, materializing from the darkness. Solas recognized her from some fete or another. She wore pale jewelry in her ears and on her hands. She was small, but she walked with the illusion of height. A noble stature. She glanced down at Ghil, and Ghil sighed. Solas withdrew another joint from his pocket, rolled tight with a filter at the end. He studied it, and then he studied the girl. He remembered her name–Hallavune. Complicated. She had straight brown hair, knotted tightly at the back of her head. High ears in the way of nobles. Solas’s, by comparison, were flat and long, and they flew straight back from his temples, like wings.

“Hi,” said the girl. Hallavune. “Do you remember me?”

Solas stared at her. He put the joint in his mouth, backwards, with the filter out. She plucked it with her fingers, fixed it for him. He smirked.

“Hallavune,” he said. “Of course. Do you know Ghilan’nain?”

Ghil nodded from where she sat on the ground, still watching the people by the fire. She rolled her eyes.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” said the girl.

Solas raised his eyebrows. “That’s too bad,” he said. “How can I help you, Hallavune?”

“Are you going to light that?” she said.

He took the the joint from his mouth, looked at it. “This?”

“Yes,” she said.

He could feel her then, prying into his face with her purple eyes. He was battered. His hands hurt like hell. He snapped his fingers anyway, the joint lit with a simple flame.

She was unimpressed. “Show me something else,” she said. “I know you do tricks in the city.”

“Do you even know my name?” said Solas, smoking, exhaling, passing the joint down to Ghil. “Or do you just call me the Wolf, like the others?”

“I know your name,” she said.

“What is it,” he said.

She was silent. He smirked. “Ah, well,” he said, straightening up off that tree, dusting his hands off on his slacks. “What is the hurt. Tell me, Hallavune. What would you like me to show you?”

She looked suspicious, but intrigued. She waited for someone to pass her the joint, but nobody did. When Ghil handed it back to Solas, he tucked it into the corner of his mouth and left it there, held out his hands, palms up.

“I’ve heard tales of your butterflies,” she said, her expensive face half-pink by the light of the moon. “Could you?”

“Of course,” he said. “Agile creatures, butterflies. Made of fire, water, lightning, or all three.” He summoned one then, in the space between their faces. A purple blip. It blinked, watching her. “Which do you think this is?”

She smiled. “Lightning.”

“Clever,” he said, bored. The insect fumed and died. She held out her hand to catch the ashes.

“Bring it back,” she said.

He puffed in on the elfroot, held it in his lungs, exhaled. He was exhausted. “It’s a bit tired,” he said, flexing his jaw. “And so am I.”

“What?”

“His name is Solas,” said Ghil as he passed her the elfroot. “Tell your friends, won’t you?”

When Hallavune looked back at Solas, he had his hands deep in his pockets. He was peering down at her through a cloud of white smoke, smiling, but deeply resigned. “I appreciate your interest,” he said to her calmly. “Hallavune. Please, come again.”

She stood for a moment, perfectly still. Outraged. She looked down at Ghil, then back at Solas. Then she huffed once and went back to the bonfire.

They watched as she was met by a litter of cold, pretty people. Shimmering, like ice. Solas dropped to a crouch to speak to Ghil directly. “You don’t have to be so rude, Ghilan’nain,” he said, but he was playing around. “She merely wanted a show.”

“I don’t care,” said Ghil, smoking intently. She glanced up at him. “You deserve better.”

Solas sighed, fell back into a sit with his elbows resting on his knees. “I hope you’re right,” he said. He stared down at his bandaged hands then, so sick of grasping.


	4. Bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

His mother was a quiet fixture in the mornings. Very still, reading her lovely books at the kitchen table. Like rose-colored light, in the shape of a woman, she could do this for hours. Frail and mighty thin with a curtain of black hair she wore loose down her back. Solas got in that morning at the yellow sunrise. He’d lost Ghil hours before, sometime at the party, and he knew it was because of something he’d said, but he didn’t know what, and now his eyes felt like they were bubbling out of his skull and he was so sore and beat to shit in his hands and his face from the fighting that he just wanted to tip over into a pile of obscurity and lose his mind for days. 

“Sleep,” he said, the moment he saw her. He pointed in the direction of his bedroom and closed the front door behind him.

But she, looking up from her book, very quiet, just shook her head. She rose from her chair. “Wait,” she said, noticing his face. “What have you done this time? Let me look at you.”

“No.”

“Solas.” The way she said it, it was not a question. “Yes.”

He stopped cold in the entrance, leaned with his back against the door. Their house was small, a ways outside the city in a meadow of purple sand daisies. It was mostly farmers out here and mid-level merchants, but his father had built this house with his own two hands, and he’d been an arcanist, so the walls and the foundation were essentially alive. Like bones, they would never crumble.

His mother was a small woman, came up to about his chin. She reached up to place her cool, hard hands on his face. It hurt, and he winced, but he let her. She was a healer, and she had a lot of power. She also had a lot of sadness. This made it hard for her to work. “I’ll make a pot of ice,” she said. “You’ll sit with it, on your face for a while, before you sleep.”

“I understand,” he said.

He followed her into the kitchen. She lit a lantern. Before he sat down at the table, which was small, and he was not, he tugged a loose satin bag from his back pocket and set it, heavy, on the surface in front of him. He dug the heels of his palms into his eyeballs and leaned.

His mother came back with a wide, orange bowl, and inside was a perfect, many-petaled flower of blue ice. She put it on the table in front of him, wrapped a piece of the flower in a cloth, and made him take it. He held it gingerly to the left side of his face. His jaw felt a bit loose. This would not have been the first time.

His mother sat down across from him, surveyed the bag of coin on the table. “Are you okay?” she said. “Solas.”

He sighed, huge, said nothing. 

“Solas.”

“What?”

She put her chin in her hands, stared at him with intent. “Proud boy,” she said. “You are not a piece of meat.”

“I know that, mother,” he said.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you let yourself become one?”

He shifted in his chair. He was so tall, everything growing too quickly. Half the time, he couldn’t keep up. He adjusted the ice a little, pressing it to his cheekbone. It all hurt like fuck. “We need the money,” he said, looking down at the table. 

“We don’t need this much money.”

“I am fine, mother,” he said. “I promise. It is not as bad as it looks.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about your bruises, Solas.” She set one of her hands on top of his. “You have always been a tough specimen.”

He half-smiled at this. 

“I am worried about your heart,” she said. “I can sense it. Getting harder already. You’re just a boy. You’re not a man. Not yet.”

He looked at her, studying. He could see the crying seed. Hers was planted deep, and it was so alive. It came free all the time, and it broke him whenever it did. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table, hung his head. “I am doing my best,” he said. “You do not have to worry.”

“And yet I do,” she said. “You come home, looking like this. Who else is going to worry about you?”

He paused, stared at the wooden slats of the table. It hurt to love her. He wished anything could be simple. 

She sighed. She released his hand. “Go to sleep,” she said, tugging him lightly on the ear, a show of affection. He wouldn’t look at her. He didn’t want to see the tears. “I’ll have another look at your face when you wake. Okay?”

He nodded.

Pushing back in his chair, he took the ice with him. When he got to his room, he shut the door and set the ice on the bedside table and put himself face down on the bed and did not think about anything. He did not think about the fights or the money or his mother or the bruises in his growing bones. He just vibrated against the sheets. Numb. And eventually, like a stone, sinking through the cool depths of dark water, he dropped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is dedicated to Viking_Woman. <3


	5. Gardening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas and his mother have a talk in the garden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

It was mid-afternoon. After he woke up, Solas found his mother working in the garden. Calmly, in her gloves and wide-brimmed hat, she pruned the roses with a large set of sheers. The day was clear, the sky pink and jeweled. You could see all the way to the spiked, crystal silhouette of Arlathan–countryside for days. He felt like shit, but he liked the fresh air.

Solas entered through the gate. The hinges needed to be oiled. He made a mental note. He crouched beside her. She turned to have a look at him, his face still bruised raw from the fights the night before. Without saying a word, she set down the sheers and removed her gloves. She held his jaw gently in her small, cool hand and turned his face to the right so she could survey the purpled skin, the split lip. “More ice,” she said. Then she commanded his eyes, and once he gave, she smiled, soft. “It looks better.” He nodded, resigning, then looked down at his hands.

When she released him, he fell back into a sit, leaning against the fence with his elbows on his knees, shredding a long, fat weed in his fingers. He tipped his head up, squinted into the sky. The clouds were like pale handkerchiefs up there, twisting past the sun. 

She put on her gloves, returned to the rose bushes. “So what happened with Ghilan’nain?” she said.

“What?”

“She was here earlier, on her bike. Looking for you. She looked like she’d been crying.”

Solas sighed. _Crying?_ He swore under his breath and put his face in his hands. 

“Hmm.” She did not push him. 

After a little while, he looked up, watched her prune the roses. She did it all by hand. The roses, everything. In their garden, they grew roses, barley, thyme, potato, leeks, and onion. Citrus. Apple trees. It smelled good. Solas’s mother believed in bodies. Whenever they worked in the garden, she demanded they check their magic at the gate. It was one of her only rules. She was a healer, and so bodies were her science, her art. Sweat and muscle, skin and lemon sun only. Solas had built that fence when he was fourteen years old, the shed when he was fifteen. A lot of Solas’s raw, unbridled strength came from the hard labor of building things in and around the garden, hauling, and planting with his hands. No magic. The men of Arlathan were soft, his mother used to say. They relied too much on magic. Physicality was an asset, and she understood this. She was smart.

“Solas?”

“Hmm?”

“Where are you?”

“Right here.”

She turned around then, fully, dusted her hands on her pants, sat cross-legged beside the rose bush. The flowers were big and ready, red and plump juicy creatures. “Will you be home for dinner?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m not going to the city today.” 

“You know,” she said, her little, gloved hands on her knees, “things will not always be this easy.”

“What are you talking about.”

“With Ghilan’nain. I’m just saying, Solas.”

He sighed, used his knuckles to dig the grit out of his eyeballs. Right away, he felt her nudge him on the wrist. She didn’t like it when he did this. He dropped his hands into the dirt by his sides. “I don’t want to talk about this,” he said.

“I know you don’t,” she said. “Just let me give you a bit of advice, and you can take it, or leave it. Your choice.” 

“Fine.”

“Girls are not simple creatures,” she said, taking off her gloves. Then, taking off her hat. Sweat beading to her forehead. She had her black hair braided like a long, shiny fin down her back. “But sometimes, Solas, all it takes is a simple gesture.”

This interested him, though he tried to remain aloof. “Like what,” he said.

She smiled, toying with the green ribbon on her hat. “How should I know?” she said. “She’s your friend.”

He hung his head, exhaled, huge. “I’m going inside,” he said, his head pinching, hurting. He was starting to itch. “Would you like coffee?”

“Yes.”

He got up from the ground then, shoved his hands in his pockets. He looked around. You could sense the tree pollen in the air. It was like a yellow dust and a song. “I’ll be right back.”

His mother smiled up at him, then she put her gloves back on and went back to her roses. The garden, as always, he noticed, was full of butterflies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt via thevikingwoman


	6. The Thing with Ghilan'nain at the Party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas and Ghil up on the roof.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

He found her on the roof. It was cold up there. Like a million sad stars. Trees that grew so tall, they became the sky. This was a crystal get-away. Ghil always knew all the best secret spots. She was an expert of sorts. When they were little she always won hide and seek.

Granted, he often let her. But still.

She’d got away from him, somehow. It had been the knives, he knew. She didn’t like the knife game, didn’t like it when he got cocky with the other boys. She called it _typical._ Making a show. She sat in a long bed of moss, was surrounded in a cloud of white smoke, and her hair was so long that the ends grazed the greenery. The first thing Solas did was drop to a crouch behind her, pick up her hair, twist it up like a rope, and swing it over her shoulder. She glanced at him, tried to smile. He sat next to her and smirked.

“What’s the matter?” he said. “Come back.”

“I’m bored of that game,” she said.

“You know it’s all a bunch of shit, right? It’s just an illusion.”

She rolled her eyes. 

He reached across her, plucked the lit joint from her fingers. She elbowed him, hard. All he did was flinch and smile. He sucked in off the filter, blew three rings into the air. “Sharing is the foundation of any friendship, Ghilan’nain. You should know this. Your mother plans weddings, writes the bloody speeches.”

“You’re an ass,” she said. “Keep it.”

He made a face. 

“I don’t even know why I come to these places with you,” she said after a while. They both looked up at the sky. Just one moon tonight, a curled, yellow fang, six stars hanging off of it like glowy spiders. “I always end up on the roof.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” he said, nudging her. He passed her the joint and she sighed.

“I mean it,” she said. She took a hit, exhaled. She was not dainty, but Ghil always took clean hits. She never coughed or took too much. She was measured, refined. “What do you think, Solas? Or are you too drunk at this point to think at all?”

“I’m not drunk,” he said. “I don’t get drunk, Ghilan’nain.”

She smiled, smoking again, the joint disappearing between her fingertips. “Right,” she said.

“Look at me,” he said, elbows resting on his knees.

She didn’t at first. She surveyed the city below. What a view.

“Come on, Ghil,” he said. “Just look at me. Please?”

She sighed, sank her head toward him. She put the joint out in the squish of the moss. “What now?”

“You’re so bored,” he said. “Then let me show you something.”

“No,” said Ghil. 

“Why not?” he said. His face a battered mess, but still somehow Solas. She wanted to fight him, and yet she wanted to–

“Whatever,” she said. “Show me.”

He grinned. It was true, he was drunk. Just a little. Just enough to give him the courage to do the thing he did next. 

It was simple really, his oldest trick. One he’d done a million times, and that he’d used to do for his mother as a child. He reached a bandaged hand, studied her face, focus to distract her, and then he put the hair behind her ear, and from the long, limp locks, he drew a butterfly. Pale blue, same as her eyes. It flickered on the back of his hand. “Just a little thing,” he said, he said, and he handed it to her.

She took it with ease, in the cup of two palms. She let its wings graze the tip of her nose. Finally, she smiled. “You’re still an ass,” she said.

“I know.”

Then, she got brave. She released the butterfly, let it dance into the air, and she grabbed his face, and she kissed him. It was long but shallow. A slow release. She felt him shudder a little bit, touch her chin, and kiss her back. It was good. A surprise for both of them. When the kiss ended, Ghil looked at him, and he studied her, like he’d never seen her before in his life. The look, so fragile. For a moment, they were god-like. But then.

“We shouldn’t,” he said.

“Why not?” she said.

He shook his head. “Too much booze,” he said. “It’s not right.”

“I’m not drunk,” she said. 

“You’re high.”

She turned away, looked back up at the yellow sliver of the moon. “It’s all just an illusion to you,” she said. She fished around in her pocket, took out a smooth, silver case. From inside, she drew a single, slender joint, rolled tightly, expertly. She lit it with the flame from her palm. “Isn’t it?”

“Ghil,” he said.

“I thought you don’t get drunk,” she said, looking at him, eyes narrowed. 

He just sighed. He didn’t know what to say. “I just–I don’t want to mess this up,” he said.

“Mess what up?”

“This. This…thing we have.” 

She smoked, blew the smoke into the space above their heads. “You’re an asshole,” she said.

He squeezed his eyes shut, confused. He had a very bad headache all of a sudden. “Ghil,” he said. “Come on.”

She stood up then, joint hitched to the corner of her mouth. She exhaled and smoother her hair, then she dashed away the blue butterfly with the blink of an eye. It crumbled like a bit of rice paper on the breeze. “I’m going back to the party,” she said. 

“Are you mad?” he said.

She just looked at him. Embarrassed, wanting to cry. Instead, she shrugged. He was like a puppy there. She had always loved him, and she liked his life very much. How his mother had used to make them rose cookies in the afternoons. Things were different now, though. Confusing. She shook her head. “I’ll find you,” she said, and she turned away and walked over to the trapdoor, hidden in the moss. Ghilan’nain left the roof.

Solas looked out at the long, crystalline view of Arlathan. The tubes and their glistening, mystic inheritance. He looked way out, way far out, in the direction of his house. But it was all pink spikes from here. This time of night, you couldn’t see anything past the city. It was just too bright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt via littleblue_eyedbird


	7. Waiting for Solas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ghil's POV. About a week after she kisses Solas at the party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

Ghil loved Solas’s house. She really loved it. It was always warm, and the lanterns were pretty–these little pink lights in tall, glass jars. Butterflies. Solas had learned to make them from his father when he was very young, and now, it was a compulsion. The magic could live for days without needing revival. Such strange power and yet, so small. So lovely. She pretended not to like this about him–his little magics–but she did. How could she not? The lanterns hung from silver wires and lit the whole house.

The kitchen smelled like roses. He and his mother grew so many in the garden. Colors of sun and milk and morning. She loved Solas’s mother. Her black hair and soft hands, how she would let Ghil try her perfumed oils, just a dab on each wrist. She could grow a flower from a handful of ashes and conjure ice in the shapes of crowns and trees. Maybe you think everybody could do these kinds of things in Arlathan, but that simply wasn’t true. This kind of magic, such pale restraint, took artistry, just like anything else. Solas and his mother were artists. They were _artists,_ thought Ghil.

Things weren’t quite so lovely at Ghil’s house. Things were rougher there. Like dried glue spilled on the carpet. Like when you smoke the joint down to the nub, no filter, and the ash hits the back of your throat and makes you cough. That’s what it was like for Ghil. The magic at her house was spiky. The magic was blue. Her father was a blacksmith who liked her younger brother better than her, and her mother planned weddings. She owned many hats. Sometimes, Ghil would go to her mother’s weddings and watch the proceedings from the rooftops and cry, alone, smoking and spinning her own yellow hair into antlers. Ghil did not like to wear hats. Ghil liked sunburn, and she liked it when her hair got tangled in the breeze.

Ghil’s mother could organize love into a beautiful party–umbrellas and ribbons all blowing in the wind. But when it came to giving love, her mother was stingy. She saved it all for the mirror. And for her fabrics. She did love Ghilan’nain’s hair. She loved it so much, in fact, that she was jealous. Once when Ghil was twelve years old, her mother cut off a small yellow piece of it and planted it in a pot to make it grow. When it did not grow, she blamed Ghil. Called her head a “fallow place.” Ghil rode her bike to Solas’s after that. He gave her a butterfly, and his mother baked orange cookies, and she ended up staying there for a week.

Ghil spent a great deal of time on rooftops, smoking, trying hard not to think. Usually, when she did this, she was waiting for Solas. He always knew how to find her. He could read the air. Or, that’s what he called it. More like catching her scent, but whatever. Sometimes, she would ride her bike to his house when she knew he wouldn’t be there, and his mother would give her a stack of cookies, just like when she was a kid, and let her to climb up the trellis just to sit on the roof alone, and wait. When he went into the city, Solas was usually gone all day. Performing his magic on the streets, and he played a lot of cards in the alleyways–bad characters in really fucked-up places. He was too young for all this, she knew. But she also knew that it was no use trying to change his mind. Solas was stubborn and single-minded. Once he got stuck on something, it was very hard to get him unstuck.

Solas had to come unstuck on his own.

So, she waited. On the rooftop. It was a chilly night. She could see the skyline of Arlathan for miles, a long, crystal bow from coast to coast. Pink and starlight dreaming. Polluting the air with its gasses. She hated the city, and she loved the city. Sort of like Solas. He could be mean, and careless, and he often made it a point to ignore her. But also, he was her best friend. He was loyal and kind-hearted. He shared everything with her, even if he did not have so much to share. It was a kind of understanding between them.

She hadn’t really talked to him since their kiss at the party. She’d been too embarrassed. But her mother had been at home pouring her jealousy into a pot of tea that night, and Ghil did not feel like listening. So she put her hair into a long, straight braid, and she got on her bike, and she road to his house, as usual. When she got there, his mother had been playing a song on her harp. She was not good at it, but she was not bad either, and Ghil liked the music all the same. After she listened for a while, it began to seem late, and Solas’s mother went to sleep. So Ghil went up to the rooftop alone with her smokes, and she waited.

When he finally arrived, it was not long after. She could see him coming up the walk with his hands in his pockets, the pale shirt hanging off his wide shoulders, a bit hunched against the breeze. She heard him stop at the porch, smelling the smoke. Or perhaps, he’d just sensed her. A moment passed, and then he said, “Ghil?”

“It’s me,” she said.

He climbed up the trellis to meet her, without a question. She was all out of smokes by now. It was dark, so she’d conjured a little cone of fire. Ghil was good with fire. She was good with trees and morning and animals, too. She was good with lots of things. Though apparently she was not so good with kissing Solas.

He sat down beside her, elbows draped over his knees. She could feel him watching her now as she watched Arlathan, all of its wide, pink mouths and glory, ruthless eyes, blinking right back. Together, they sat like that for a long time. And eventually, he looked away, down at his hands, as usual. He rubbed them together. They made a papery sound. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to be the one to speak first, Ghil sighed, massive. She didn’t know what else to do.

“I’m really sorry,” she said.

“About what?” he said.

“For kissing you. I’m sorry. It was stupid.”

He glanced at her. He was smiling now.

“What?” she said.

“You’re sorry for kissing me?”

“Yes,” she said. But he was staring at her now, and the smile–it was a smirk all of a sudden. She got all mixed up, again. “Or, I don’t know. Maybe I’m not.”

“You’re not sorry?”

“What the fuck?”

“You said it, not me.”

“I missed you,” she said, exhaling, and then she laid down on her back. The stars overhead were breathing them both into existence. Slow, heavy stars, thick, with hot, white light. “Are you happy?”

“Of course I am,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be happy?”

“You’re always so in control,” she said. “How do you do that?”

She heard him sigh then. Deep, growing. He laid down next to her. She turned her head so she could see him. “I am not always in control,” he said.

“So what? It’s just another one of your illusions?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Maybe. You would know.”

“I don’t feel in control,” she said, looking back up at the sky. “I feel like my head is too big for my body.”

“That’s because it is,” said Solas, perfectly serious. “It always has been.”

“See? There you go again,” she said. “Ass.”

“I’m kidding, Ghilan’nain,” he said. “It’s just a joke.”

“Well I’m not,” she said, and then she was back in his eyes again, swimming around like a squid fish. She thought she felt him soften for a moment, maybe just a little, right into her, but that would have been a miracle, and Ghil was not sure she believed in miracles. “I’m having a shit night.”

“Your mother, I assume,” said Solas, turning toward her on his side, resting his head in his hand. “What did she say to you?”

“Nothing you haven’t heard before,” she said. “Same old shit.”

She was suddenly very aware of her breathing, and how it made her narrow chest rise and fall there on the roof beside him. But he was not looking at her chest. He looked regretful. His eyes, huge. Everything pulsing. “She’s wrong,” he said. “And you are not like her, Ghilan’nain.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said.

He smiled. “Okay.”

“Where were you tonight?” she said.

“Winter Street,” he said.

“Anything good?”

He shook his head. “The tables were ice cold. It was horseshit.”

“Is that why you’re home so early?”

“Is it that early?”

She shrugged.

“It feels late,” he said.

“Maybe it is. The stars are too bright tonight. I can’t tell.”

“Hmm.”

“Solas,” she said, turning to face him.

“Yes?”

“Can I stay here tonight?” she said, her face hot, looking away. “I can just sleep up here on the roof. It’s okay.”

“You aren’t going to sleep on the roof, Ghilan’nain,” he said. “You’ll freeze.”

“I’ve slept on the roof before.”

“So?”

“It’s fine. I have my fire.”

She felt his hand then, bare but scarred as usual, lingering at her jaw. He drew her chin so he could study her. A quiet undoing way up there. She was frozen in place. But he was focused. Practiced in a way that did not surprise her. He always seemed to know what to do. “You’ll come inside,” he said.

“Fine,” she said. Then, “What are you doing?”

“I think I want to kiss you,” he said. “Right now. Is that okay?”

“You do?” she said. Her skin hot and prickly. She could sense the little fire she’d made go out with a poof.

“Yes.”

“What about what you said at the party? What about our _friendship_?”

“We’ll always be friends, Ghilan’nain,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“No,” he said. “But technically, we’ve already kissed once. And we’re still here. So, will you let me? Yes, or no?”

She took a deep breath. She felt so light, like she might float away, but he had his hand on her waist now. Almost like he knew, an anchor. She was not entirely sure when that had happened, but it had, and so without any further confusion, she just nodded her head, once, and then, like that, as if he’d planned to do it all along, he leaned in, and he kissed her.

It was slow at first. He was very warm and very tall. He engulfed her, deeply familiar, and yet, he was not. His hands were rough on her skin. She put her own on the back of his neck as together, they coaxed each other a little further, and for a moment, she thought it felt sort of like trying on a dress. It was stupid, but true. She was trying him out. And it was okay. It was good. And he was so gentle, she thought, so forgiving. Not like the other boys she’d kissed on rooftops. Solas was subtle, just like his magic. He put the hair behind her ear as he did it.

But then, just as it was about to become something else, whatever that was, they heard the front door open from below, and they heard Solas’s mother walk out onto the porch. “Ghilan’nain?” she called out. “Are you still up there?”

The world around them came to a screeching halt. Their mouths parted, and Solas, flushed, glanced over his shoulder. She’d never seen him flushed before. Not anywhere but the boxing ring. And then, like some sort of great big puppy, he tipped his face into her neck and sighed. They were kids again.

“I’m still here,” said Ghil, unable to lie. “Both of us.”

“Solas?” said his mother.

“Yes,” he said from somewhere inside Ghil’s hair.

“When did you get in?”

“I haven’t been in yet, mother.”

“Well do come in soon,” she said. “Both of you. It’s freezing.”

They listened then as she went back inside.

Solas picked up his head, looked at Ghil, smiled in a knowing sort of way. “You taste like smoke,” he said.

“Shut up,” she said. She closed her eyes, really squeezed them tight, and for the most part, she thought, the whole thing was sort of funny. They’d survived, apparently. He got to his feet first, helped her up, because that’s what Solas did, even when they were little. He got up first. Together, they climbed down the trellis to the porch, went inside and met his mother in the kitchen. She had a pot going on the stove. She poured two glasses of milk, one for each of them. They sat down at the table, across from one another.

Ghil shook her hair out of her braid. it was all mussed anyway. She was a little embarrassed, and she knew she smelled like smoke, just like Solas had said. She caught him, smirking.

So she looked away, started talking to his mother. “When did you wake up anyway?” she said. “Lea. I thought you went to sleep.”

“I was sleep,” she said, and she came over then and picked up Solas’s face by the jaw, studying the old bruises. He sighed, but he allowed it, just for the moment. “Though I am really no good at sleeping, am I?”

“The tables were shit tonight,” said Solas, finally removing her hand from his face. “I got nothing.”

“We’re just fine,” said his mother. She went back to the stove. “And please, Solas. Don’t swear. Especially if you insist on gambling. You’re much too handsome for swearing _and_ gambling. It’s not right.”

Ghil laughed, one blip. He glanced at her. She could feel something between them. Like static electricity as they sat there, drinking their milk. He, of course, acted no differently toward her. In control, as usual. Or was he? In any case, the house smelled good as they sat there together, like they’d done a thousand times, by the light of twenty pink lanterns, his mother making them soup in the middle of the night.

It would have been easy for Ghilan’nain to be jealous of all this. Especially given her mother’s loathsome predilections. But she knew the truth. In fact, other than his mother, she was the only one who knew. He had his own darkness to contend with. It was not all roses and butterflies for Solas. She just didn’t want to lose him.

Because she had this feeling. And Ghil got a lot of feelings. It was part of her thing. Her magic. This one–this feeling was like a death wish, coming off of him in little sparks. With Solas, everything was always just a little too close to the edge. Running the tables. Taking punches for money. White hot stars exploding in the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt via littleblue_eyed bird


	8. Old Rumors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas and Ghilan'nain, about a month after the kiss on the roof.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

They did a little thing every year after the first snow. Sort of like a party, but just the three of them. Solas, his mother, and Ghilan’nain. Solas’s mother loved the snow. She’d go outside in her boots and her gloves and bring it in by the bucket, and she’d set that bucket on the kitchen table and she’d say, “Watch, children.” 

And it didn’t matter how old Solas was, or Ghilan’nain, they both watched, rapt, as she hovered her hands over that snow, and she closed her eyes, and then–blizzard. The whole house, a little snowstorm. Swirls of white and bluster, but nothing ever got wet or freezing. It was almost pure illusion, and yet, it wasn’t. She just had a way with water. She could make it dry if she wanted. Dry water. What a world.

That year, Ghil rode over on her bike. She’d gotten better with her magic and tricked the wheels so that it could ride in the snow. She knocked on the door, and when he opened it up to greet her, Solas was chewing on a pine needle. He smirked. 

“Nice mittens,” he said.

“Shut up,” she said.

Inside, his mother was making cocoa. She had Solas build the fire, and she brought Ghilan’nain to the vanity and braided a wreath into her hair. Little red berries and conifer.

“You’re like a stalk of wheat,” she said, directing Ghil to look in the mirror. “If wheat were still beautiful in winter.”

Ghil blushed, hid her face. “You’re lying.”

“I’ve never once lied, Ghilan’nain.” She smiled. And when she smiled like that, she looked just like Solas.

In the living room, Solas was sitting on the couch with his head hanging between his knees. 

“What are you doing?” said Ghil.

He glanced up, taken. For once. He was earnest. “What’s that?” he said.

She put her hands on top of her head. The room was molten. The lanterns hanging from the ceiling were filled with little butterflies in the colors of red and gold. “Your mom did it,” she said.

“Let’s go outside,” he said. “Grab your mittens.”

“Okay.”

“Dinner is in fifteen minutes,” said his mother. She was wearing a long, satin skirt in the color of morning. Her hair was down, a black fin. “Don’t go far. And please, no smoking, Solas.”

“No smoking,” he said. They put on their wool jackets. Ghil put on her mittens, and together, they went outside. 

They walked with their hands in their pockets. Past the garden, which slept beneath a blanket of snow. Arlathan was blue and dreamy in the distance. In the winter like this, it always looked to be floating. Something about the reflections in the snow. Solas nudged his shoulder into Ghilan’nain’s. She nudged him back.

“I heard a rumor about you,” said Ghil.

“Excuse me?”

“Yup.”

“What rumor?”

She shrugged.

“Ghil.”

They stopped at the absolute edge of the property. You could see where it ended. There was a little red flag stuck into the ground on a wooden stake. The next house was just a little box in the distance. You could see the smoke rising from the chimney, big and white. In the summer, this would have all been daisies, and the sky would have been much pinker. But in the winter, like this, everything was silver. 

Solas watched the moonlight as it caught in her hair, all tangled in the wreath. He knew now. She was fucking with him. He grinned. “Did you know, Ghilan’nain, that in the ancient times of the Old and Forgotten, Crystal Grace bloomed in the skies like starlight?”

“What?”

“A kind of worship,” he said. “Sometimes, when it got cold enough, and the ground was covered in snow, it would show itself, just for a moment. And if you saw it, you’d have good luck for a whole year.”

She just stared at him. She was confused. And maybe it was the moon or something, but when had he gotten this tall? “What the fuck are you talking about, Solas?” she said.

He took his hands out of his pockets. “It’s just a rumor,” he said. 

Then, he took her lightly by the ears and kissed her. It happened so fast. She grabbed his wrists, held him there, and kissed him back. She was worried the moment would end too soon. 

And of course, just like any good moment, it did.

When they parted, he took her mittened hand. Together, they stared up at the sky. “Did you fall for it?” said Solas.

She put her head on his shoulder. “Shh,” she said. “I’m concentrating on the stars.”

She was kidding, but it was weird the way she’d said it. They heard his mother calling then, standing out in the yard in her snow boots. She was shoveling the snow into a bucket. They turned back, holding hands. The night had only just begun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt via littleblue_eyedbird!


	9. Animals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas and Ghil go to the beach.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _18 years old_

Every once in a while, Solas and Ghil would pack their shit and head out to the sea. Solas in his suspenders, and Ghil in her bathing suit, with her long, long skirt and her long, long hair, a yellow whip in the breeze. This was one of their favorite things to do.

It was the end of the summer, and that day, they took Ghil’s bike. Solas steered while Ghil rode on the back. They filled the basket with snacks and smokes, and they went down a long, cobble rode flanked by farms and factories and there were merchant wagons all decorated with flags and pretty ribbons. The whole world was the color of wheat. The sky was armored gray but in some places, the sun chewed through and put its shiny, pink teeth into the earth, making it just warm enough. 

When they got there, they put out a green beach towel, and Ghil sat and watched Solas chuck seashells into the water. It was not terribly crowded, but there were plenty of women there in their hats, bathing in the mild sun while the men ran with the children in the waves, like puppies. At some point, Solas came and sat down and lit a joint and he gave it to Ghil and plopped onto his back and closed his eyes. He seemed tired that day, so she let him be, and she just smoked and she took a lemon from the basket and she set it in the sand. She pinched a finger to its flesh and grew a little crab right from the heart of it, and she blew three smoke rings into the air as it poked its weird head into the world and then waddled away, striped and new. 

Solas sensed this, the change, propped up on his elbows and squinted at her. “What did you just do?” he said.

“I made a little crab,” she said, pointing. “See?”

He looked, smiled. “Very good, Ghilan’nain.”

“I can do more,” she said.

“Show me,” he said.

So she looked around, slender as a reed in her very long skirt, and finally she gestured to one of the women behind them, lounged on a chair in a two-piece bathing suit with her eyes closed, wearing her broad feathered hat. Solas turned onto his stomach to watch. He was very serious. 

Ghil took a hit off the joint and set it between his fingers, then she blew the smoke out in a big long string. She closed her eyes. He watched. The wind was a great big whisper all around them. Full of blue beauty and secrets. She put her hands in the sand, and when she took them out again, she was holding a bird. It looked exactly like the woman’s hat. It was tall and blue with a red-feathered belly, and it was alive. It looked cute there in the sunlight, blinking up at them both, fully grown and yet, brand new to the world.

Solas reached out to dust the sand from its feathers. He pet it on the head with two fingers. It squeaked. “Ghil,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were doing all of this?”

“I only just figured it out,” she said, looking down at him. She tipped the bird into the sand, and then it opened its wings and flew away. “I’ve always been good with animals. I just…channeled it somehow. It’s new.”

“New?”

“Yes, new”

Solas was smirking up at her, smoke rising in the air between them.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said, then he took one last hit off the joint and put it out in the sand. “Let’s go swimming.”

“Uh-uh,” she said.

“Why not?” 

“Because my hair is way too long for swimming. Do you even know what would happen if I got it wet right now?”

“So put it up or something. Put it in a braid.”

“It takes forever for me to braid my hair. It’s down to my ass.”

“Then I’ll do it,” he said. “Come on, Ghil. Don’t be boring.”

She shoved him. “I’m not boring.” He tipped over onto his back and smiled. “And since when can _you_ braid hair?”

“I’ve seen both you and my mother do it a thousand times,” he said, pushing up into a sit. The green towel was all mussed beneath him. “I think I can figure it out.”

”Well, if you can figure out, then fine. I’ll go. But if you do it wrong, I’m not moving from this towel.”

“I will not _do it wrong_ ,” he said. “Turn around.” 

So, she did. 

As Solas braided her hair in the half-gray sun, Ghil watched the crowned eagles on the greenish sea, swooping down and fishing their prey. She wondered what it would be like to fly.


	10. The Suit: Pt. 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas and Ghil are going to a wedding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

They were sitting on an abandoned streetcar right outside the Great Gate, watching the trains go by. Behind them, skyscrapers rose up by the thousands. Ghil hated how the city could poke the clouds in their insides, making them its bitch. Everything was so hazy and pink that day. They could hear the noises of a street fair coming up the tracks. Kids and dogs and things. A lot of stupid magic, Ghil thought. Popular magic. The kinds that could make the masses go _ooh_ and _ah._

“My mom says I have to,” she said, sucking in off the joint, letting the smoke go hard into the chilly air. “It’s like, her most important wedding of the year. Or whatever.”

She was pretty fucking anxious. Solas lifted the joint from between her fingers and hitched it between his lips. “Relax, Ghilan’nain,” he said, smoking, no hands. He had a deck of cards instead, was shuffling it compulsively. “Maybe you need a drink.”

“I don’t drink,” she said, leaning back on her palms. He watched her watch the sky. “I could start.”

“I was kidding,” he said. “Don’t be so dramatic. And of course I’ll come with you. To the wedding. I know you want to ask, but you’re nervous. Why do you get so nervous to ask me things?”

“Because you’re _you_ ,” she said, swiping the joint from his mouth, finishing it in one slow drag and flicking it to the dusty train tracks below. “But thanks, Solas.” 

He smirked. “No problem, Ghil.” 

She put her head on his shoulder, watched him shuffle the cards like a kind of hypnosis. Then she looked down at her feet, swinging back and forth off the edge of the street car. Big metal box, stacked on top of twelve other big metal boxes. All colors. She’d climbed up on her own, and he’d showed up later. He’d been showing up a lot lately. Ever since they’d kissed at his house on the rooftop. She only half-believed his interest, but she loved him anyway, and she wanted his company. It was a thing.

A train sped by their fast, flushed faces. It smelled like fire, like a great, smoking and many-wheeled monster. Flipping and turning and going and going. Once it was past, Solas chucked the deck of cards into the dust-ridden weeds in its wake. He looked quite pleased with himself.

“Solas, don’t litter,” said Ghil. “That’s stupid.”

“Those cards will become a part of the earth in mere seconds, Ghilan’nain,” he said. “I invented them for this very purpose. Watch.”

She watched. She always watched. But nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. She sighed. “Ass,” she said.

“Wait,” he said. And then he smiled, and he reached behind her ear and withdrew a single playing card. He held it out between two fingers. The Queen of Hearts. “Don’t believe everything you see, Ghilan’nain.”

Suddenly, she was holding a deck of cards. She wasn’t sure if he’d handed it to her, or if it had just appeared. Anyway, she studied it, and then when she glanced down to the tracks below, she saw nothing. The cards weren’t there. Not anymore. If they ever had been. The deck in her hand was the same as before.

He tugged her on the hair, braided like a yellow whip down her back. She surfaced quickly, shoved him hard so that he laughed, and dropped the cards into his lap. Then she got quiet and put her head on his shoulder one more time, and she told him that if he didn’t have a suit, she knew a guy who could get him one, pretty much for free, and that he could even have it tailored and everything by tonight.

Solas took a joint from his pocket it, lit it with the spark from one of his butterflies. It flitted overhead for a moment and then disappeared. 

The truth was, Solas did have a suit. Ghil probably didn’t remember. Or, if she did, she was being nice. In any case, he hadn’t worn it since he was nine years old. He’d dubbed it the “funeral suit” and never thought about it again, not until today.  

“I’ll get one,” he said, two rings of smoke in the air. “Don’t worry about me, Ghilan’nain.”


	11. The Suit: Pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cont'd

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

About an hour later, they climbed down off that streetcar and went past the Great Gate and into the city. Only three Authorities had the mind to stop them that day. Shifty teenagers. Middle class. But Solas impressed them each with a handful of butterflies, and they were quickly on their way.

It was getting colder. In the sky now, there was a black weirdness. Swirling. A great, mad eye, and everywhere smelled like glass and water. Ghil prayed hard that it wouldn’t rain. Whenever it rained, her mother turned into an extra bitch and she just wasn’t in the mood. Solas walked slightly ahead of her, against the wind, with his hands deep in his pockets. It was all like a great big tunnel in these parts, funneling the air a thousand miles per hour, freezing her bones and putting ice behind her eyeballs. Ghil wanted to go home.

They stopped at the corner of Winter and Plain. Solas leaned against a lamp post and glanced up at the weather. “That does not look good,” he said.

“I’m going home,” she said. “I just wanted to walk you into the city.”

“I’ll pick you up tonight,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because,” she said. “My dad thinks you’re on drugs.”

He smirked down at her. “I am on drugs,” he said. “And so are you.”

“Well, then he thinks you sell drugs. He heard something. I don’t know, Solas. Just please don’t come.”

“Are you serious?”

She sighed.

“That’s horseshit,” he said, straightening up off the lamp post. “Let me talk to him.”

“No,” she said. “Solas, no.”

“I am not a drug dealer, Ghilan’nain,” he said. “I don’t get in the middle of that sort of shit.”

“I know,” she said. “Solas, I know. Just, please. It’s not worth it. My mother doesn’t even believe him. Promise me you won’t come.”

“No.” 

“Please, Solas,” she said. “Any other day. Just not today. Please. It’s already fucked up enough with it being a wedding. Just not today.”

He glanced around, pissed. But when he saw her face, he sighed, and he slumped back into the lamp post, stone-faced and defeated. “Fine,” he said. “I won’t come today.”

“Do you promise?” she said, clutching herself against the cold. People passed them on all sides. Many of them wore tall, ostentatious hats in the shapes of birds, or else they were simple, but Ghil could tell they were expensive either way. “Solas, do you promise?”

“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”

“Good,” she said. “Because sometimes, you’re a liar in this way. You say one thing, and then you do another.”

He shot her a look. “I have never once lied, Ghilan’nain.”

“Oh, please.”

“Fuck that. You just told me your father’s been spreading rumors about me, and now you’re calling me a liar. Be careful, Ghilan’nain.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. There were little rain drops now. Just the tiniest ones, hitting her on the cheeks. “I’m sorry. You’re right, Solas. I’m just freaking out.”

“Clearly,” he said. He exhaled. All out of elfroot, he drew a single playing card from his pocket, rolled it up tight and set it between his teeth. He chewed, closed his eyes. He was gathering his focus. “It’s all right.”

“I’ll come get you around sunset,” she said. 

Solas nodded, once. 

She reached back to tighten her braid. Somewhere down the street, a stupid choir began to sing weird hymns in a windy tunnel. They were perfectly in tune. “I want your mother to help me with my hair anyway. So maybe I’ll come earlier than that.”

“Your hair?” he said, suddenly glancing down at her. 

“Yes, my hair.”

“What’s wrong with your hair?”

She looked up at him. She realized she could no longer tell how high he was. She couldn’t tell how high _she_ was. Most of the time, for all they smoked, they were just…level. The two of them. But every once in a while, the smoke cleared, and there was something about him. Maybe it was the confidence, the warm, garden roots, his mother, the brick and mortar soul of his dead father. Whatever. But every once in a while, he said exactly what he felt, and, in his own stupid way, he got sweet. 

“There’s nothing wrong with my hair,” she said to him. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

But the moment was already past. She’d lost his attention. He wouldn’t even look at her, chewing on that playing card. He watched a man sweeping old napkins off the street instead. He wasn’t angry, not at her. She could tell. He was just–

“Solas?” she said. She tugged him on the ear. It was a compulsion. She’d been doing it for so long. But she immediately regretted it and crossed her arms over her chest. “Is everything okay?”

He glanced in her direction. “Yes,” he said, but he wasn’t really in there. He was gone away now. It was all just a black nothing with Solas sometimes—a fucking rain cloud eating up all the sun in the whole, wide sky—and no matter what she did, she couldn’t bring him out of it. He’d have to come out on his own. 

She just hoped it wouldn’t take too long. She hated how it could take so long.


	12. Invention

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ghil and Solas play cards on a rainy day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _17 years old_

They’d been in the city earlier that morning, before the storm rolled in. They got high on the train cars, and then they went over to Sparrow Park where they found a good place in the leaves to sit and be and watch the carousels. The ground was damp, but they didn’t care. The carousels were multi-colored and very beautiful, outfitted with huge ceramic beasts like unicorns and dragons. The kids were everywhere. There was an accordion player somewhere nearby, and it made the whole world feel romantic and sort of weird. Like a music box.

It’s going to rain, said Solas, gazing up into the sky.

Not it isn’t, said Ghil.

Of course, he was right.

They’d somehow managed to beat out the worst of it. Now, the clouds were a harsh glass, and the purple lightning dwarfed the city. It was just some weird, metal spikes in the distance now. They were at Solas’s house, sitting on the living room floor. Solas was teaching her Diamond Back by the pink light of the fire. The house smelled like berries and winter. But it was summer. Time was quiet back then. They moved through it like specters. It hardly made a peep.

Solas’s mother was outside, communing with the garden and collecting rainwater into yellow buckets. She lived for the rain. The fertile earth brought her joy, and she would later come in and take off her jacket and dry her hair with a towel, and then she’d make them glasses of ice water flavored with lemon. It was a delicacy. The ice, they knew, would be in the shapes of little flowers and bees. They looked forward to this, every time. Every time that it rained.

“I don’t get it,” said Ghil finally, falling back onto her palms. Her hair was long and shiny and dusted at the floor like hay fever curtains. Thunder shook the house.

“What don’t you get, Ghilan’nain?” said Solas, chewing on a thin wooden spoon. He’d saved it from lunch.

“Why does the five of cups outscore the five of windows?” she said. “Windows are much fancier than cups. They’re much bigger and more expensive than cups, and they use a whole lot more glass.”

“It’s not a literal translation of real world economics,” said Solas. “It’s a card game.”

She bit her nails. She’d been biting her nails all afternoon. Leanathy would not allow smoking in the house. “What’s it called again?” she said. “This game?”

He shuffled the cards. “Diamond Back.”

“And what do diamonds have to do with this?”

“Nothing.” He smirked.

She rolled her eyes.

“Come on, Ghil,” he said. “Play with me. Don’t be such a girl.”

He reached forward, flipped the hair off her shoulders. She swatted at his hand, which only made him do it again. This time, she laughed. “Fine,” she said. “Deal the stupid cards.”

“Your wish is my command,” he said.

They sat across from one another. Ghil had her legs tucked beneath her, but at some point, Solas had sort of spread out and he was a tall specimen. He commanded that space and the entire room just by sheer force of being. The whole house was golden dim with butterflies filling jars that hung from the ceilings. Such lovely symmetry of light and gold and rain and fire. The wind was coming down the chimney and filling the air with its ghostly music.

He beat her four hands in a row. It did not take long. In the middle of the fifth, she grew exasperated and declared that she no longer wished to play.

“You’re cheating,” she said.

“I have never once cheated, Ghilan’nain,” he said. “I invented this game. Why would I cheat at my own invention?”

“You invented it?”

“Show me your hand,” he said, ignoring her.

“No,” she said.

“Just show me.”

“No.”

So, of course, he plucked the cards. He was very quick.

“What the fuck?”

Before long, they were both on their feet. She was on her tip-toes, trying to reach, but he held the cards high overhead, and he was too fucking tall, and she felt like some sort of little bird as he, crow’s nest of a boy, studied her cards, one by one, and then he backed into the kitchen until he hit the table, and then he hopped up onto its marbled, wooden surface, and he showed her both hands: his and hers.

“You won,” he said.

“I did not,” she said.

“Yes you did, Ghil,” he said. “You won. Look at you. So crabby about cups and windows. You just beat me on a pair of quills.”

“Fuck off,” she said.

She snatched the cards from his hand. “I won?” she said. But then, she sneezed. Everything stopped. It was quick and small but it was still a sneeze.

When she looked up, Solas was leaning back on his palms, smirking his ass off.

“Did you just sneeze, Ghilan’nain?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s very cute.”

She shoved him hard in the shoulder. “Shut up,” she said. He smelled like elfroot, but he also smelled like rain. He put the hair behind her ear. She thought he might kiss her.

But then, all at once, his mother came inside. Clockwork, it seemed. They both looked up, as if in ritual. Solas hopped off the table, and Ghil went to tidy up the living room. Leanathy made them ice water, just like always, and she poured it into these beautiful blue cups that Ghil had never seen before. They all sat sipping at the kitchen table. Solas had sliced up a lemon and put it in a bowl in the middle. Ghil asked Leanathy where she’d gotten those cups.

“Solas made them,” she said, her wet hair braided off her face. Her eyes tired but a beautiful gray, as winter. “He’s gotten very good with glass.”

“He made them?” said Ghil.

They both glanced in his direction. But as usual, Solas was not paying attention. He was daydreaming, or something, inventing, whatever. Just shuffling his cards as the rain beat down off the roof like marbles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt via roguelioness


	13. Some Nature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Craps tables on Winter Street.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _19 years old_

They were faded as fuck. The elfroot was a little too strong that night. He’d bought it off a weird huckster on Winter Street, and he knew it had probably been a bad idea, but he did it anyway. They were bored, and it was after the knuckle fights and the parties were all bullshit—all a bunch of rich assholes in swimming pools wearing berets that looked like turnips. So they decided to come down here instead. Casino after casino after casino. Warm rooms in a brass alley, all lit with candles in the shapes of trees. It was some kind of thing down here: candles in the shapes of trees, as if that somehow made up for the illegality of it. Look, everyone, some nature. The candles winked at them and sang their names in lovely, minor keys.

Ghil watched Solas play craps for a long time. It seemed to go on forever. There were maybe four or five other guys at the table, pretty much all of them older, but they all seemed so nice, and everybody kept asking her innocently if she would like to roll. She just said no, trying to be polite, until they got the picture. She hated rolling the dice in craps. It was very stressful. Solas would sometimes tease her for this sort of thing, but that night, he seemed calm, and so she just smoked, debonair, and sort of leaned against him as he gambled, and her skirt was made of this thin, crepey material in the color of forest fires, and as usual, she felt sort of alone. 

There were a few other girls there that night, hanging off their men, but they were all sad-eyed and quiet, and they would just look at her as if she had somehow stolen their youth from them. She tried to ignore. At some point, Solas got hot, and then once he quit, that was that. They went outside to finish the elfroot by the light of the moon.

Solas had won in the Ring that night, as usual, but he had endured a very black eye. The knuckle fights were getting old. They both knew it. She kept wanting to touch his face. It looked like some sort of dark fruit up there, but he wouldn’t let her. 

“That thing looks bad,” she said.

“It looks worst than it is,” he said. “Come on, Ghil. Just be.”

So she leaned into the blue brick of the building, and she just was. The air was cold and wet tonight. He took a long drag off the joint and passed it to her, and together, they looked up at the sky. There were all of these castles floating over Arlathan, these floating castles, way up in the clouds. They were abandoned, in ruins, and most people said it had been the Old Gods who’d made them, but most people didn’t know shit. In any case, they were these wistful, haunted looking things built of glass and high, brick spires and lots of weird symbolism in the crosses and gargoyles. Hard stone walls and colorful green windows and all of it overgrown in these strange, blue mosses that seemed to blink, but it was impossible to make out anymore from here. 

Those castles were dying. Every once in a while, pieces from their dilapidated rooftops would fall off and crash down into the city, crushing through somebody’s ceiling and killing a cat or worse. Such sad science. But predictable. There was no way to fix them and no way to tear them down. 

Ghil smoked the joint. She passed it back to Solas.

“Those castles give me nightmares,” she said.

“How come you never want to roll the dice for me?” he said, glancing down at her, looking very coy. “At the tables. You know it’s only luck.”

“I am unlucky,” said Ghil, hugging her arms to her chest. “Craps is stupid. I do not want to be responsible for somebody else’s loss and despair.”

“Loss and despair?” said Solas, smirking. He tossed the joint to the sidewalk and shoved his hands in his pockets, caught in a slow exhale. “Let’s go home.”

“I don’t wanna,” said Ghil. She put her head on his shoulder. “My mother keeps asking me for my opinions on things.”

“Like what?” said Solas.

“Like she got a bunch of new dresses. Also, this new tea pot that she spent way too much on. My father is pretty pissed about that one.”

Solas laughed at this. “Then just come home with me,” he said. “Who cares.”

“Okay,” she said.

They walked back and it took forever. The city was massive, and there were Authorities everywhere, looking out for troubled youths. Solas and Ghil were two of them, but at least they were together, and that was more than some could say. She linked her arm in his as they trekked toward the Great Gate. Once they got past it, unscathed, the world opened up and became rural again. It all smelled like roses. Immediately, the high wore off. Fade turned to beauty. The sand daisies were a breathing, purple crop of midnight. In the skies behind them, the floating castles hummed. _Look everyone, some nature,_ they seemed to say. Ghil laughed at nothing. It was good, going home with Solas.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt via ladydracarysao3


	14. Symmetry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas and his mother, meal time. Leanathy's POV.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _18 years old_

Solas had set the table with porcelain plates. They were the good ones, sturdy and pale blue with floral etchings in gold and silver. Earlier that day, he’d spent six hours out in the yard, mastering glass. His mother had shown him a special technique, drawing pressure from the air and trapping it inside a bottle, tipping that bottle into fire and mixing it with sand. That was how he made glass. Of course, she grew glass from the earth. She could cultivate glass, as ice, as roses, as anything, but Solas had a different skill set. His magic was drawn from the cosmos, and while he was, at the age of eighteen, stronger than his father could have ever hoped to be, it was still his father’s magic he had inherited. Magic of, not the earth, but the thing that held the earth in orbit. Gravity, matter,  time itself.

Solas was a builder. He could reconstruct your reality, and this was rare, and so his mother, on multiple occasions, had hoped he would, at least while he was a boy, keep it a secret. “In the boxing ring,” she told him once as she formed her smooth, hard hands to the clay on the pottery wheel, “nobody is looking for genius. And while I wish you wouldn’t, if you must take punches, Solas, then make the other men trip and stumble. Make them see double. Twist their vision. Make the audience laugh. But you are special. This magic, in its highest form, is the kind of magic that builds worlds.”

Of course, she did not even really know what she was saying, not at the time. She had no idea.

At dinner, that night, they drank from the glasses Solas had built out of fire and pressure and sand in the yard. They were clear and blue as water, patterned with geometrically perfect blocks that came as a byproduct of Solas’s technique. Everything he made was a thing of symmetry. Even as a boy. His instincts, perfectly attuned to the magic of balance. His mother, Leanathy, as she served them their dinner–chicken soup with carrots and baked potatoes–was desperately proud. She loved him so much it was like putting her head through a window. She could hardly breathe. And a mother’s love like this is always accompanied by fear.

“I need a suit,” said Solas, abruptly in the middle of dinner. They ate by the light of three butterflies in a jar. He ate quickly, and he ate a lot. “Do I have a suit?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not one that fits anyway. Why do you need a suit?”

“Ghil,” he said.

“Ah.”

“She is dragging me to another of her mother’s weddings,” he said. Silverware clanking. “The last suit I had, I unfortunately lit on fire at the golf course.”

“You lit your suit on fire?” she said. “I certainly hope you weren’t in it.”

“No, mother.” He smirked. “It was the just the jacket.”

“Was it windy?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“When your father used to smoke,” she said, “whenever it got windy, he would put his jacket over his head like a cloak and light his joint from the inside to keep it from blowing out. I was always worried he’d light himself on fire.”

Solas stared at her. They were drinking ice water. “That’s exactly what happened,” he said.

“Odd coincidence,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows. “So, what do you say?” he said.

“What do I say about what?”

“About making me a suit. I need it in three days.”

She started laughing into her ice water.

“What?” he said.

“I’m not going to sew and tailor you a suit in three days, Solas,” she said. “Besides, I’m terrible with a needle and thread. You’d be better off doing it yourself. You’re the one with the eye for symmetry.”

“I don’t feel like it,” he said, leaning back in his chair, finished. He wore a linen shirt that hung off of him, two sizes too big as he sat there growing, growing, growing.

“Well I certainly don’t feel like it,” she said.

“What am I going to do?”

“Buy one,” she said. “You’ve got money.”

“Not that kind of money.”

“How much money do you need?”

“Too much,” he said, shaking his head. “Ghil knows a guy, but I don’t trust him. He’s shifty-eyed.”

“Shifty-eyed?”

“Yes,” said Solas, taking a deck of cards from his pocket. He began to shuffle right there on the table. “He is a bouncer on Winter Street. I don’t like bouncers.”

“Why, because they ask for your age?”

He glanced at her. “No,” he said. “Because they lack intelligence. They are easy to fool. They also mouth off to the bartenders. They start bar fights to try and impress the women.”

“Does it work?” said his mother.

“Of course not,” he said.

She folded her napkin in her lap, finished as well. Then, she smoothed the black hair off her face and put it behind her ears. She seemed to be stuck on something. He was worried all of a sudden.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“I believe I’ve got something that might work,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“A suit,” she said. “It belonged to your father. He was a little older than you when he wore it, so it will be big in the waist, but I can take that in. I believe you’ll fill out the shoulders just fine.”

Solas stopped with the shuffling, looked up. He and his mother had the same gray eyes. The exact same gray eyes. The only difference was, in the warm, pink light of the evening, with the butterflies flickering in theirs jar on the tables and the jars that hung from the ceiling overhead, hers became almost wintry. Blue, as glass. Solas leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “Really?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and she smiled. Something overtook her. She became sad and distant, rushed. She pushed back from the table.

But before she could go, he took her by the wrist. “Wait,” he said.

She looked back, she smiled at him. So overgrown. Like a great, handsome weed she had created. The nights got tired when she was alone. She still read his old letters. The ones he wrote while he was away at the war. Over and over and over and over. “I’m fine,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Solas, smiling. He looked so much like him sometimes, it made her wither. It made her weep. But then it made her strong. She was the trunk of an ancient tree, just there to hold him up. She bent down to kiss him on the eyebrow, and then she palmed his forehead and shoved his head back, in jest. He smirked at this. She did as well. He went back to shuffling his cards. She went to the hall closet and found his father’s old garment bag. Outside, there were crickets, singing them into spring.


	15. Eight of Cups

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas and Ghilan'nain, hanging out at the golf course.

Sometimes, Solas and Ghil liked to go to the golf course to watch the rich people take big, full swings and hit their golf balls into the sea. Of course, they never meant to hit their golf balls into the sea. It just always seemed to happen that way, didn’t it? Solas and Ghil would sneak in through a hole in the fence and climb to the top of a steep hill hanging over a sand bar, and they would get very high, and they would watch, and they would count the golf balls and make fun of the women in their hats in the shapes of birds, and then, when they got really bored, Solas would do a bit of magic. 

“Purple or purple?” he said after a while. He had the cards fanned out in front of her. The sky was a sleek and metallic gray. It plunged into the sea, waking it up, putting its waves hard into the shore. Another idiot lost his ball to the sea foam. Eight on the day. They laughed as he swore.

“Red,” said Ghil, leaning back on her elbows. “But I thought this was a card trick. Why am I making a choice?”

“Because I’m bored,” he said. “Now pick a card. Any card.”

So, she did. 

He told her to memorize the number, and then to eat it.

She glared at him. “I’m not eating this,” she said. “What the fuck?”

“Fine,” he said. “But if you won’t eat it, then the trick won’t work, and we’ll have to pack up and go home.”

“You’re such a shit.” She rolled her eyes and folded up the card and put it in her pocket. She showed him her hands. “That’s as good as it’s going to get.”

He smirked. He spread out beside her. “I’ll just have to adjust. How many golf balls have we seen hit into the ocean today, Ghilan’nain?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Eight?”

“Exactly eight,” he said. “Now what was the number on the card you just folded up and put in your pocket.”

She smiled at him. He was expectant, still smirking, totally unfazed. She shoved him and dropped to her back. 

“What number, Ghil?” he said, staring at the clouds. They were moving quickly. The air smelled like fish and salt and the coming rain. It was going to storm. 

“Not eight,” she said. 

“Are you certain?”

She glanced at him. “Yes.”

“Why don’t you check one more time?”

She reached into her pocket, unfolded the card. Eight of cups. She turned and grabbed him by the jaw. “How the fuck,” she said.

He shrugged. “Sleight of hand,” he said, smirking one last time. “This is not magic, Ghil. You’re just an easy target.”

She smiled and rolled over onto her stomach. She watched the waves rolling off the sea and slamming hard into the shore like big, geometrically perfect hands. Crystals and shapes of all blues and greens. Inspired. There were sea lions out there. And dolphins. And some weirder animals she had probably never even heard of. It was a certainty. “It’s going to rain,” she said. “We should go.”

“Probably, you are right,” said Solas, and he rolled onto his stomach to meet her. She could tell he wasn’t high anymore, and neither was she, but he smelled like smoke and he was so big and tall, she couldn’t help herself.  So she just put her head on his shoulder, and she thought maybe he would kiss her. He didn’t. But that was okay. 

Instead, they watched three more golf balls hit the waves and disappear. They stayed there, just like that, until some asshole in suspenders came up and made them leave. Solas laughed, and then they went home and watched his mother meditate in the garden as the storm moved in. They leaned against the fence, Solas with his hands in his pockets. Things were changing. Between them. Out there, in the sky. Just more weird animals taking shape in the weird world. She didn’t want anyone else. At some point, the rain was matting her hair to her face and they were still outside. She said, “This is crazy, Solas.”

He glanced down at her. He smirked. “Not really,” he said putting the wet hair behind her ear. Then he just went right back to leaning in the rain. Stupid shit.


	16. Happy Valley Lanes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas and Ghil go bowling and talk about the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _19 years old_

They liked Arlathan in the late nights. Like when the sky filled with smoke and the factories went to sleep. All the people had already left the city in a great big whoosh, and the streets were empty. Just a bunch of garbage blowing around in the wind. It was a time for mischief, and it was a pink moon that night over Arlathan, and the floating castles beckoned with their dreary eyes. Flaking piece by piece. Who would have guessed that inside a year this whole thing would have gone to shit?

Solas and Ghil left the Weathers after a long afternoon of doing nothing but smoking and watching his mother in the garden. They tumbled into town after she went to sleep, not knowing what else to do. So they went to the bowling alley. It was a crass and shitty place all filled with teenagers, most of them younger, and strange first dates, and the occasional cluster of middle-aged men attempting to relive their glory years. These were the kinds of elves who bowled. The bowling alley they went to was called _Happy Valley Lanes_ but this wasn’t really any sort of happy valley, as far as they could see.

But who needs a flashy bowling alley? Nobody goes to a bowling alley to feel fancy. Solas and Ghil had come to terms with their rural trash lives a long time ago, and especially now that they were in love, they had no need for light shows. They just wanted bowling pins and bad lighting and people who gave no shits just like them. Also a pitcher of beer. Plus, you could still smoke inside which, outside the casinos and the Ring, was not the typical rule in Arlathan.

This place had a falling-apart bar and two bouncers and a juke box powered by steam and magical impulse. The floors were old wood and the whole place reeked of smoke and beer and you could order a basket of fried pickles if you so pleased. They put on their bowling shoes and Solas sprawled out on the bench while Ghil used a pencil to keep score. She was no good at bowling and was typically happy with anything above a 90. Solas, however. Well, you guess.

“Don’t make fun of me,” she said. It was the end of the game. Ghil: 97. Solas: 210. She sat down next to him on the bench. “Please, for once.”

“I would never make fun of you, Ghilan’nain. Why would you say that?”

“Because I suck.”

He smirked. “Well, you may suck,” he said. “But you’re extremely pretty.”

“Shut the fuck up, Solas.”

She elbowed him. He dipped the joint and blew the smoke into the air above her head. “Let’s go again,” he said.

“No.”

“Why, because you suck? Who cares. It’s just bowling.”

“I’m bored.”

He waved her off, wasn’t having it. He got up to go buy another pitcher from the guy at the bar. When he came back, she’d lit another joint and had put her long, blond hair into a braid. She did look pretty. Something about the weird blue lights of the bowling alley. A sad girl, but true. She didn’t care what anyone thought of her--except for him. He refilled her glass. She was smoking and watching the game going on in the next lane over. Most of the teenagers had gone by then, and now it was just them and two couples on some sort of awkward double-date. Both of the women clearly had their sights set on the same man, while the other just sat, oddly content, drinking his beer alone on the other side of the booth.

“So who do you think will win?” said Solas.

She handed him the joint. “The brunette. She obviously wants it more.”

“How can you tell?”

“She keeps asking this guy about his job,” said Ghil. “Boys love talking about themselves. She’ll win for sure.”

“And what does he do?”

“Carpenter,” said Ghil. “Or...something with wood.”

“Charmingly specific.”

She sighed. Together, they watched the double-date as it failed. “Tomorrow I have to help with another one of my mother’s weddings,” she said. “Apparently I’m gifted with floral arrangements.”

“You know, I have always thought that.”

She nudged him. “Shh.”

He passed her the joint. “Why do it, if you’re so uninterested?”

“What else am I supposed to do, Solas?” said Ghil. “She pays me, bizarrely enough. I'm trying to get out of there.”

“Move in with us,” he said. “Who cares. We have money. Do what you want."

"I can't move in with you."

"Why not?"

"Because your mother."

"My mother knows everything," he said.

“She does?”

“Of course,” said Solas. “She asked. I have never once lied to her.”

“I mean, that’s bullshit,” said Ghil.

“You know what I mean.”

“What did she say when you told her?”

“She just wanted to make sure.”

“Make sure what?" said Ghil.

“You know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“That we’re being safe.”

In the neighboring lane then, the brunette hit a strike. She put her hands up into the air and gave a walloping shout. This seemed to endear her to the lonely man in the booth. He said, _Come here and give me a kiss._ And she said, _Really?_

Ghil straightened up then, and she looked at him. She had these weird hazel eyes, almost like the color swamp water. They made her seem even more darkly magical than she already was. “What about you?” she said. She said it almost like she’d been thinking about saying it for quite some time.

“What about me, Ghil?”

“What are you going to do, Solas?”

“When?”

“With your life.”

He plucked the joint from her fingers and hitched it to his mouth. He reached into his pocket. He withdrew a deck of cards. He seemed to lose interest in the conversation immediately.

“Solas?”

“I’m doing it,” he said. “What do I know? What would like me to be doing?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I was only asking. You have--you’re talented, Solas.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. You know your dad had a lot of friends in really high places. Plus, your uncles. They’re still loyal to him. Any one of them would take you in as an apprentice. You could be an architect, like he was.”

“An architect, huh?”

“Yes.”

“And if I don’t want that?”

She drew her knees to her chest. She wore these big, loose, pretty pants made of red silk. They had little pale flowers embroidered at the knees. “What do you want?”

“I have no idea,” he said, shuffling the cards. “What do you want, Ghil? To plan weddings?”

“No. I don’t know.”

"That’s what I thought. It is not so simple, is it?”

She got quiet. The whole place got quiet. It was like somebody had shut the lights, or at least turned them down. It was just them now, and the double-date next door. Only they’d split off, into two separate dates. Somehow the man in the booth and the brunette--they were actually kissing. It was wonderful.

Ghil smiled at this. She relaxed. She smiled at a lot of things. Solas was different. They were getting older. This was change. He was under all this pressure, and he always had been. Splat, a handsome young man pinned to the earth. It was like he cared about nothing, and yet.

He seemed to sense her, calm. He slung his arm over her shoulder and hung his head as far back as he could. “If I apprentice in the city,” he said, “I’d have to move to the city.”

“No you wouldn’t,” said Ghil.

“Eventually.”

“Your father did it. He worked in Arlathan, and he came home every night to the Weathers.”

“I am not my father,” said Solas. “It’s different now.”

“I know that,” said Ghil.

"It's just...different."

“I’m sorry, Solas."

"Do not apologize."

"I know you’re worried about her. I know you won't leave. Please, just. Nevermind.”

Nevermind.

He set his chin on top of her head. In that moment, you could hear the jukebox flicker and come back to life. There were still a few weirdos back at the bar, drowning in their whiskey, but the double-date was gone. She did not mean to press him. She just knew him. Without a purpose, Solas was just some wandering soul. Anything he did, he would master. She knew this, too. He could own those gross bullshit casinos on Winter Street if he wanted. And in the Ring, he was still Fen’Harel. But all of this--it was just a front. He wanted their stillness. Backwater. Gardening and smoke. Quiet living. Like this, just some shitty bowling alley at the back of the universe, as the jukebox whistled tunes of sad goodbyes, and in that moment, she wondered what would become of them. It was all so hazy from here.

 


	17. Yellow Boxcar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas and Ghil, in the old train yard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _14 years old_

When Solas was fourteen, he once spent a whole day in the shit train yard outside the Great Gate of Arlathan with his magic and a great many tools, and he somehow worked the roof off one of the old boxcars. It was yellow, that boxcar, and he had thought that it was neat, but it needed a skylight and he was bored out of his unholy mind, so he did this, and it was hard work, and when he finally finished, he drank a whole jug of water bigger than his head, and he put out a blanket, and he smoked two joints, and he just lie there, high as a fucking kite, looking up at the crystal, hay fever sky, and feeling unfinished. In general.

Ghilan’nain had tracked him there. Like an hour before. She now sat in the tall weeds, leaning against an apple tree with the sand daisies tickling her throat. She just sort of waited. See, she was bored, too, because this was the suburbs. And Solas always had these fucking ideas. Ideas. Like let’s go tear the roof off some boxcar. Let’s sneak into a warehouse and mess with the machines. He was a very cute boy with a stupid attitude and she wanted to punch the shit out of him while also making him her first love. She hated being fourteen and wished she could just skip it. Romance sucked. She wished she could be twenty-five. Maybe then at least she’d know what the fuck was going on and have a life of her own here. In the boring Weathers outside of Arlathan.

When they had been very young, Solas had been her first friend. He still was, but let’s be serious. He needed to be alone, all the time. Brooding and thinking and smoking like he thought he was so cool and important. As kids, they would go to the beach by themselves and build huge castles in the sand. When his father died, she held his hand at the funeral and together they watched as his mother fell beside herself, while they lowered the box into the ground. His mother had been wrapped in black silk. Beautiful and cold and laid bare to her love. Solas never once cried. Not as far as Ghil saw. She remembered him the very next day, digging huge holes in the earth with his bare hands. He would stare into the abyss of existence and then fill the holes back up again. When he noticed her there, he looked up, and he said, “Hey, Ghil,” as if nothing had happened. They were nine years old. He needed so much, but he would not say it. She took him to a grand hill after that. They went all the way to the top, so they could see the sea shore. She said to him, “It’s okay, Solas. I’m here. Forever.” And she held his hand in dire friendship, just like at the funeral. He did not say anything.

They had been kids, and she still remembered. Now he was ripping the ceilings out of boxcars and getting high all alone. He was so confusing? She did not have enough friends. Sometimes Solas would go hang out with these buddies of his, and they would just get high and play cards for no reason. They always seemed to be yelling. He did not want her around, and yet, when he did want her around, he seemed calm and happy. His mother would make ice water in summer, and the world was a safe haven for them. Nothing could go wrong. Ghil thought about all this that day while sitting under the apple tree, taking in her view of the yellow boxcar, knowing Solas was in there, and wishing he would come out but at the same time, terrified.

Boys are such shit, she thought to herself as she popped the head off a purple daisy. Why can’t anything be simple.


	18. Young

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ghilan'nain and some mean girls down on Winter Street, looking for Solas at one of the casinos.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _19 years old_

Winter was a colorful chill that year, mild. The sky was red. Ghil had been hanging out in one of the alleys near Winter Street in Arlathan with a couple of girlfriends. They were snotty bitches who wore too much make-up and drank prissy booze, and she knew they only kept her around like a pet because of Solas. He could get the good drugs. He knew all the good parties, and he had a leg-up in every casino in town. Free drinks. Ghil put up with these girls because otherwise, she had nobody but him, and that seemed a stupid way to be.

She wondered where all the regular girls were. The ones who just smoked and liked to lie down on rooftops and look at the shapes in the stars. She had begun to wonder whether this was a kind of girl that actually existed, or if they were all exactly like her, and this is the thing that kept them separate from one another: they were each taken up by some tender, cute boy who felt everything but didn’t know how to show it. Ghil loved Solas so much those days, it made her teeth hurt.

These mean girls with the make-up, they all lived in dreamy castles in Arlathan, but they were small potatoes. They were anything but _nobility._ Their families were stupid foot soldiers to the actual queens and kings. It was like a joke. Even still, they thought Ghil’s country life a trashy novelty. They looked at Solas and they saw an unattainable treat from the wrong side of the tracks, and he sort of let them bat their eyelashes at him for a while, because he liked the attention, but that was it. He always went home with Ghil. Or, she went home with him, rather, as she had not actually spent the night in her own house for near on a month.

Ghil hated it there. She wanted to be free. She wanted to spend her nights at Solas’s house where his mother was the kindest witch in all the Weathers, and even after all these years, she still showed Ghil how to do special kinds of magic with the roots in the earth, and she would braid Ghil’s hair for her in the mornings and make ice water. Ghil showed her once how she could grow baby animals from the knots of trees—like baby chipmunks, baby eagles. Solas’s mother found this very impressive, which was high praise. Solas, meanwhile, just liked to build shit. He restored an old train car at the back of their property to working order. He put it on a track and everything. Ghil still wasn’t sure how he’d gotten it back there, but he did, somehow, and the magic he’d used was so confusing, he’d had to write it down. Just a bunch of math, she thought.

Ghil could wither birds and flower them back up into the shapes of hats, but Solas once cut a hole in space and took her through it, and together they walked in a tunnel made of stars and that somehow dropped them into one of the floating castles over Arlathan. _How the fuck?_ said Ghil. He tried to explain. She could make animals, but he could fold the physics of the world in on itself and somehow write it all down, and this, to her, was the height of genius. But he didn’t seem to care. He had very little ambition. He just wanted to restore old train cars and experiment with worm holes in the sky. When she asked him what he planned to do with such superior magic, he merely shrugged his shoulders. “What do you mean?” he said. That was it.

So tonight, she was hanging out with the snotty bitches of the upper-middle-class of Arlathan, waiting for Solas. He was supposed to be in the Ring, but Ghil thought maybe he wasn’t there that night. He had gotten sort of sick of the knuckle fights and probably he was actually in one of the casinos instead. He played a lot of cards in those days. She thought maybe this meant he was calming down, but there was no way to be sure. Solas was just…Solas. He did what he was gonna do, and she couldn’t stop him. Nobody could.

“This root sucks,” said Hallavune. She flicked the joint to the sidewalk. She had very pretty black hair. It was so shiny, it could have been a creature slicked in oil.

Ghil sighed. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said.

“Where?” said Areina. She was blond like Ghil, but her eyes were like ice cream cones, kind of droopy and wet all the time. Hallavune and Areina didn’t really want Ghil to leave. Ghil knew this. Because if Ghil left, that meant no Solas.

Ghil looked around. “One of the casinos,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

“Hurry.”

She went down the block a little bit, took a right into the casino called Pale Dreaming. It was the one with the tree-shaped candles, and she liked it here. It was the softest of them all, and the bartenders were nice, and they mostly knew her, because of Solas.

“Hey, kitty cat,” one of them said. He was an older man, like forty-two, sleeves rolled up, polishing a rocks glass behind the counter. “What can I get for you?”

“Gin,” she said. “Just a little. On the rocks.”

He poured her the drink, put a little sprig of rosemary. “On the house,” he said.

She smiled, sipped her drink. She did not like to drink very often, but when she did, she liked gin. She liked juniper berries. Gin tasted like the woods. “Has Solas been by?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “He’s here now.”

Ghil looked up. “He is?”

“Just stumbled out back for a piss, I think.” The bartender winked. He was a married man and very sturdy and somewhat handsome, but he had a deep scar going from the root of his left eyebrow all the way down to his earlobe. She wondered what could have given a man like this a scar like that.

“Thanks,” said Ghil, reaching for her purse. “Can I tip you?”

He clicked his tongue. “No, ma’am.”

She went out the backdoor. One of the bouncers showed her out. Usually, only employees got to go back there, but she was different. She was special. She was Ghil.

She found Solas not far, his head pressed hard to the wall, pissing in the alley. He had his eyes closed. She leaned right beside him, plucked a joint from her pocket. The moment she lit the end, he smiled.

“Are you a literal wolf now?” she said, smoking, debonair. “Marking your territory?”

He zipped up, gave her a look, smiled. “What are you doing back here?”

“I needed to get away from Hallavune and the other one,” she said. “They hate my elfroot.”

“Not good enough for them?” said Solas. She passed him the joint. He took a drag, passed it back.

“Certainly not,” said Ghil. She sighed. “Did you even make it to the fights tonight?”

He shoved his hands in his pockets. It was chilly out there. “No,” he said. “I think I’m done. For real this time.”

“Seriously?”

“No promises, but yes.”

She got on her tip-toes, gave him a kiss. “I think I’m gonna just hang out at the bar,” she said. “If you’re going to be a while.”

“Not much longer,” he said.

“Can I bring the bitch brigade in here? Or will they get kicked out for being too _pure_.”

“You can bring them only if they promise to make a face when I tell them I have no elfroot. I’m completely dry.”

“I have tons,” she said.

“Yes, but apparently, it’s shit.”

She shoved him. He laughed into her ear, kissed the highest tip. “It’s cold,” he said.

“Okay.”

She tossed the joint, stamped it out with her boot.

But as they turned around, she saw something weird,  on the wall. “Solas,” she said. “What the fuck is that?”

He raised his eyebrows, took a step around her so he could see. Where he’d taken a piss before, there was a little vortex. Like, cutting into the plains of existence and pulsing black and silver, like a little mouth. “Holy shit,” he said.

“Are you that drunk?” she said. “You’re pissing magic?”

“I am _not_ drunk,” he said. He kicked the wall once, and the vortex disappeared. “I don’t think.”

She sort of laughed, let him win. He kissed her on the hair and they went back inside.

One day, they would really miss this place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This came about when 5ftgarden (Vesania94) asked me to write a little piece about Solas pissing magic, per his in-game banter with Sera. "We were all young once!"


	19. Metropolis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas receives a dark proposition.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _19 years old_

Ghil was leaning against the bar at the Gumball Machine, a huge club in Arlathan with loud music and pink light and white sandy beaches and a mirror ball the size of the moon. She hated it. If she’d wanted sand, she would have gone to the fucking beach. Hallavune had wanted to come here, and to Ghil, it smelled like coconuts and burning rubber and sex.

“Tell your boyfriend we missed him at the Ring last night.” Hallavune was sitting on a table, surveying the dance floor. They kind of had to yell over the music. Two hundred young elves with two hundred bad attitudes were out there, dancing their crystalline asses off. Hallavune was wearing high heels. High, high heels. They were the highest. Ghil thought about snapping the little stilleto parts in two.

“He’ll be here soon,” said Ghil, taking a big wad of pink gum out of her mouth and sticking it under the counter. She lit a joint. “Tell him yourself.”

Meanwhile, back in the Weathers, Solas was in a hurry. He’d gotten distracted with chores. His mother badly needed to hire someone to reshingle the roof. There was a loose patch, and with the last storm, there sprung a leak in the living room. Solas still had a couple of uncles from his father’s side living in the city, but she hated to call on them for anything in a pinch, and it looked like rain that night, and there was no time. So she was halfway up the ladder herself when Solas told her to get down and then he fixed it. He’d been cutting slate and asphalt with a switchblade all afternoon and all evening. Now, he was dirty, and sweaty, and tired, but the job was done, and his mother said, _One day, you’re gonna have no choice but to let me fix the roof myself, vhenan,_ but he just waved her off and threw on a pair of boots and told her he needed to get to the city. She didn’t ask a whole lot of questions those days, ever since he’d backed off the knuckle fights. _Don’t be too late,_ was all she said as he went out the door. It was all she said. _Don’t be late,_ which was to say, _Please come home, and when you do, please be quiet. I’ll be pretending to sleep._

He grabbed a locomotive into town. There were steam commuter trains that passed through the Weathers about six times each day, and though he usually liked to walk when he went into Arlathan, this time, he wasn’t in the mood. He felt like shit, and he wanted a drink. He sat in the back of the very last car, slouching deep with his arms crossed over his chest in the velvet chair, looking out the window at the whirring neons and sand daisies and the old abandoned trainyard and the Great Gate of Arlathan. It was a silver monstrosity. The ride was only about twenty minutes. This was a dead train. The only other riders were a pair of thirty-somethings absorbed in conversation about a crooked family member, while their redheaded toddler sat cross-legged on the floor, clutching a weird little doll and staring at Solas.

At first, he tried to ignore her, but she was like a little bird with big purple eyes and a bright beak who smiled every time he glanced, and this made him sort of weak for reasons he couldn’t pin down. He didn’t have a great deal of experience with children, other than the urchins he’d used to impress with his penny magics on street corners. In any case, he gave in, and he made her up a little butterfly on his way out the door—just for her, purple like her eyes, and like the sea. She and her parents all clapped and the mother laughed, and she was so charmed, she said, “What _is_ your name?” and he just told her. “My name is Solas. It’s nice to meet you.” Then, he was gone.

He met Ghil at the Pink Fuck Palace. It was one of those rich kid clubs and it was actually called the Gumball Machine, but he called it the Pink Fuck Palace, because that’s exactly what it was. Inside, there were girls everywhere, a few of them he knew, and they were tipsy, and they either demured because they knew about Ghilan’nain, or else they came on too strong. He smiled easy. He had very little to say. When he got to the bar, he found the bartender, who he knew as a dealer from one of the casinos on Winter Street, and he was polishing a glass and nodded down to the other side, where Solas saw Ghil, smoking and working desperately to ignore her rich friend Hallavune.

He snuck up behind her, gently bit the tip of her ear.

“What the shit?” she said, and she swatted him off.

He smirked and swung around between her and Hallavune, leaning against the bar. The bartender poured him a neat glass of clean whiskey, on the house. “Ladies,” he said.

Ghil rubbed the tip of her ear. She blushed. He was looking straight at her. This still kind of took her by surprise sometimes, Solas’s focus, no matter how long she’d known him, because every day he seemed to get taller and his jaw was becoming this chiseled serious thing with stark drop-offs and a lot of angles. He just kept getting bigger, which she didn’t understand. When the fuck did boys stop growing? She felt like she’d been done for years. “Took you long enough to get here,” she said.

“I had to patch up the roof,” he said, looking around. He was leaning on his elbows, sleeves rolled up. His shirt was a pale blue.

“What?” said Ghil.

“My mother tried to do it herself, but you know her. She can grow a tree from a piece of dog hair planted in the earth, but any time she uses tools, she manages to injur herself.”

“You patched the roof _yourself_?” said Hallavune.

“Yes,” he said, smirking. “I did.”

Ghil rolled her eyes. Hallavune finished off her very pink martini and hid behind her very blond hair.

“I need to head out back for a moment,” said Solas, swigging his whiskey. “Wait for me, then we’ll go somewhere else.”

“What?” said Ghil. “Why?”

“Reasons,” he said. “This is a terrible place to drink, Ghilan’nain, but they sell the good drugs.”

“Fine, but hurry,” said Ghil, eyeballing Hallavune. She seemed distracted, like somebody important had just walked into the bar. Ghil tugged on Solas’s ear hard, brought it down to her mouth. This made him laugh. “I mean it,” she whispered.

 

Solas bought a bag of elfroot off a huge fellow name Nylan. He’d never dealt with him before, but he was older, and he had a few stitches in his jaw and a crumpled left ear which said he’d used to be some sort of serious fighter. He rolled a joint and they split it in solidarity, then Solas kicked off to have one more on his own. He leaned against a heavy lamp post, and he looked up at the spiritual mess of stars overhead. He thought only of the small things. His stupid life, Ghil, and which bar he wanted to go to next. He was tired.

He emptied his lungs and got ready to head back inside, but then, he felt a presence, something small but powerful, sucking the temperature out of the alley and leaving it cold. He looked around but the dealer was gone. He was alone, save for a woman, maybe twenty-five years old, standing not ten feet away, staring straight at him. She seemed to have come out of nowhere. He straightened up out of habit, manners taught to him by his mother. He continued to smoke, but he knew this woman—or, he recognized her, vaguely. Hers was some sort of familiar face, one he’d seen painted in frescoes in the train station, and the library downtown. She was rich, important, wearing this long, dramatic, tailored white trench coat that made her look like a queen. After she caught his eye, she approached. She wore high heeled boots that clicked and clicked and clicked.

“Can I help you?” said Solas, smoking in the brass-lit alley. There were five or six lanterns strung up on a wire overhead, filled with a peculiar kind of fire.

The woman did not answer at first. Her brown hair was slicked back into a kind of fin between her shoulder blades. She just stared at him. She stared at him, in awe, like she knew him, like she’d been searching for him for some time. Then, she held out her tiny, leather-gloved hand. “I am Mythal,” she said.

He peaked at her through a cloud of white smoke. She was pretty, but she was like ice. He shook her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mythal,” he said. “I’m Solas.”

“I know who you are.”

“Clearly.”

“Your reputation precedes you,” said Mythal, removing her gloves. “Fen’Harel.”

“That is not my name,” said Solas, releasing the smoke from the corner of his mouth.

“I know,” said Mythal. “Your name is Solas.”

“You’ve seen me in the Ring then, I take it? That’s how most girls learn my name.”

“Yes. Though I have not seen you there in some time. Have you retired?”

“Very recently,” said Solas, half fucking around. He tossed the joint, pressed it out with his boot. “The money’s not as good as it once was, and I like my face.”

“As do many, I’m sure.” It was innocent.

“What do you want?” he said. He put his hands in his pockets. He gave very few shits, and he could tell that this unnerved her. She bristled, hid her face, unused to being handled with such blunt force.

“I want you,” she said.

He gave her a look. “Excuse me?”

“I’ll come straight to the point,” she said. “I have a job for you, Solas. Only you.”

“You have a job for me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that is a surprise,” said Solas. “No one’s ever offerd me a job before. Tell me. What kind of job do you have for me, Mythal?”

“Personal body guard,” she said, placing the gloves delicately in her pocket, examing her clean and polished fingernails. “And strategist. I know who you are, what you come from. I knew your father. You have mathematics in your blood, Solas, an ancient physics, and a great deal of power. You’re young, and your tough, and you’re big, and you’re elegant, and you’re worthy. I want that. There would be plenty of opportunity for advncement, I assure you.”

“You knew my father?” he said. He studied her, curious.

“He used to work on my family’s castle when I was young,” she said, looking away, as if emarrassed. It seemed to pain her. “He was my mother’s favorite architect. He designed our belfry, and he built me several dollhouses. It was also our army’s barracks that he was building when he died tragically in the south.”

Solas shifted and leaned back against the lamp post. “Your army’s barracks?” he said.

“Yes.”

“So you tracked me down,” said Solas, “followed me here, to the Pink Fuck Palace, and then into a seedy alleyway where the riff-raff come to buy their vices, simply to offer me a job, because you knew my father, and because it was your war that killed him, and because I have ancient physics in my blood?”

“Yes,” she said. She was soft now, and earnest. Something about her was warming to him, and the mention of his father. Her cheeks were pink. Her hair seemed to flutter, as if populated by one thousand tiny, brown sparrows, but Solas knew it was only an illusion. “What is the Pink Fuck Palace?” she said then. “I thought this place was called the Gumball Machine.”

He smirked. “It is.”

This seemed to confuse her. “What?”

“I do not want your job, Mythal,” he said, fixing her with his focus. “But thank you for the offer. I’m flattered that a woman like you would take such dire interest in my future.”

“Wait.”

He went past her. “I am not a body guard.”

“You’d be much more than that, in time. You’ll see.”

“Thank you again.”

“Stop,” she said.

The alley got dark. The lanterns flickered, and it was like a kind of blue electricity in the air. The force with which she’d said it, Solas had very little choice. He did stop, but he did not turn around, the hairs on his arms stood straight up. “Talk,” he said.

“There is a war coming, Solas,” she went on, taking a few steps toward him, hesitant, as a mouse. “A civil war. Just ask your mother. She’ll know. The tells of a wartorn aristocracy are small, but if you know how to find them, you’ll see that they are there. It is rotting, from the inside. There will be factions, soon, and those factions will clash. I promise. All of you, everybody here, you will become casualties, fallout, territory, nothing more. So you can hide in your meadow suburb, fixing rooftops, paying the bills with your gambling, and praying it will not take you _and_ your mother, or you can come with me.”

“Go with you?”

“I will provide you with whatever you need,” said Mythal, “whatever you want. You’ve seen the Blue Fortress from your skyline views? That is my castle. Every last spire. It can be yours as well. But I know that you are not a young man so seduced, so know that is not all I’m offering. I’m offering protection. You can bring your mother, and your girlfriend, her entire family. I will protect them all. I will protect you, and I will make you more than you are. But you must agree. You must take my offer, before it is too late.”

He took his hands out of his pockets. He studied his knuckles, finally healed after so many months outside the boxing ring. But they were scarred as well. He adjusted his sleeves, placed his hands back inside. He turned to face her. She was so small, she barely reached his shoulders in height. She was smaller than both his mother and Ghilan’nain, and they were not big women. Her eyelashes were very long. Her mouth was very red, and her jacket was very green. She was a bold woman, but he knew, in this moment, that however bold she was, Mythal had not come alone. She went nowhere _alone._ There were men on all sides of them, in the shadows, holding spears and staffs, outfitted in golds and silvers, their expressions as still and silent as stone. He didn’t like it.

Solas cleared his throat. He was not intimidated by wealth, and certainly not by men. “You say there is a war coming,” said Solas. “So, you’re recruiting soldiers. That’s what this looks like to me. That’s what it looked like ten years ago, when my father was killed in one of your wars.”

“You are not a soldier,” she said. “You are more than that, and so was he.”

“Thank you,” he said, his voice like gravel. “I must decline.”

“Consider my offer,” she said. “Your father would have. He did.”

“I have considered your offer,” he said. “I am not interested in your job, or your protection, or your bargain, Mythal. And I am not my father. Do you understand?”

She clasped her hands in front of her, lifted her chin. She was like a lone sea creature there. She was a bright light and a sucking black hole. “Yes,” she said, very soft, unwilling to argue where she knew she could not win. This was a virtue in the eyes of Solas. “Very well. Thank you for listening.”

“You are welcome,” he said.

She then left him in the alley, and all her men left with her.

Solas was jangled after that. He shook out his head like a dog and quickly put together another joint and smoked against a brass gate to dull out his senses. The entire interaction, it had made him want to hit something.

The nighttime weather was sweet in the summer months in Arlathan. There were green patches of grass cracking through the sidewalk, little blue flowers with brown, dried edges, and a glowy abundance of fireflies. Vines grew everywhere, up and down everything, even back in that alley, like infectious diseases, multiplying. He was still alone, but somewhere off in the distance then, he heard the dull crackling of an explosion and several loud bangs. These kinds of noises broke all the time in the city, and one never knew if it was fireworks, or something else. He thought briefly of the young family on the train. He smoked.

At some point, Ghil came out to find him. She looked concerned. He felt terrible the moment he saw her. He hadn’t meant to be gone for so long, but time got away from him, and he straightened up off the brass gate and dipped the joint and apologized.

“I’m sorry, Ghil,” he said, holding out his hands. He shook his head. “I didn’t mean to take so long. I got—distracted.”

“It’s okay,” said Ghil. She didn’t seem mad. She didn’t even ask what he’d been doing ou there. “It’s last call anyway.” She just cuddled up into him and put her warm head on his shoulder. She smelled like gin. He smiled at this, kissed her very long, very shiny blond hair. _Last call._ They left. With his arm around her, they took a walk down the alley, and they smoked, and they left the alley, and they went out into the big city and just existed, like specters. They passed a handful of beggars, spared what they could. There were women in high heels, slinking around in the fire escapes, looking for partners, smoking neon green cigarettes, and a group of young boys walking around carrying baseball bats. Why the fuck they needed baseball bats, Solas had no idea. He had not grown up here. Neither of them had. They had its glittery guts memorized, but it wasn’t home. Their home was in the Weathers, and that’s where they were going now.

Solas’s father had used to make fireworks, he remembered as they left the city through the Great Gate. Really big fireworks, all colors, and they had maddenly real smells about them—apple pie, mangoes, rain. When Solas once asked how he did it, his father wrote down a series of math problems for Solas to work out in his head. Solas was making his own fireworks, albeit much smaller ones, not six hours later. He was eight. _There’s mathematics in your blood, Solas._ Solas’s father had then, a few short months later, been blown up in a display that, to some, might have looked very much like fireworks. Very much like math. And so it was all just a great big fucking joke in the long run, Solas thought. There was no rhyme or reason. There was only action, happenstance, presentation, the end of all things.

Solas never told Ghilan’nain about Mythal, what she’d said, or that she’d even existed. When they got home, he scooped her up and together they reminded each other that no matter what, the world was still not ending. Not for them. Not yet.

But they were young. And that night, they’d snuck inside the house, and they were very quiet like they always were, so as not to wake Solas’s mother. Of course, Lea was not sleeping. She was not even inside. She was out back, wrapped in a silver blanket, staring up at the milky, black sky of the Weathers, waiting for it to rain. The moon was full, but it was overcast. She sensed something out there on the horizon, thumping in the Backwater, and then back behind her, buzzing in the big, pink haze of Arlathan. Maybe a sandstorm. Maybe lightning. It is true that, in the ways of dark prophecy, nobody told it better than Mythal, not back then. It’s why Flemeth is the way she is. And if Lea had known what Mythal had said out in that alley about the war, she would have agreed, just as Mythal said she would.

 _Something is coming,_ thought Lea as she sensed her son and his girlfriend falling asleep to the safety and the sounds of the wind chimes and waves crashing in off the sea. _Something big.  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In [Chapter 36](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/21133997) of _[The Dead Season](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/16972533)_ , Morrigan tells Kieran the "true story of Mythal and the Dread Wolf," a story she comes to learn after drinking from the Well of Sorrows. The beginning of Morrigan's story is what I have adapted here, and it goes like this: 
> 
>  
> 
> _"Once upon a time, there was an empress in search of a champion. She traveled to farms and villages far and wide, throughout the entire kingdom, but none of the men she found were to her liking. They were either too small or too meek, too foolish or too crass. She desired an elegant man, a master of his own invention, a man of his charm, and a man of his own two hands. But these were rare qualities indeed, even then. For a long time, the empress came up short._
> 
>  
> 
> _One day, she finally found him. A young man. He was a boxer and a gambler and as tall as a mountain, and very clever. He was strong. His magics were unique, and she'd known his late father—an architect who had used to build her dollhouses when she was a girl. So she approached him one day, the son of the architect, inside the Great Gate of the big city, and outright, she offered him a position in her powerful army. When he asked her why—for he was clever, let us not forget—she told him that he was special, and that there was a war coming, and that if he left with her that very day, he would be granted power, status, and full protection for his widowed mother. The young man thought about it, but he was insolent and brash by his very nature, and eventually, he said no. He would not go with her, and he would not join her army. He did not believe her stories of the coming war. So the empress, who knew good and well how to pick her battles, said, Very well, and she was on her way."_
> 
>  
> 
> -gala


	20. Nesting Birds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _19 years old_

Sometimes in Arlathan, the snow would fall from sunny skies, like a reminder, or a warning. The clouds would gather over the Weathers and the Backwater farms where the nature was pure, blanketing the purple fields and the hilltops and the golf course. It was a lot like any other world, any other place where the redtails dive into the sea and there are farms and seasons. Solas’s mother would get out her shovel, clear the walk before Solas had the chance to do it for her, and he would be pissed off at this, but sometimes, like today, he would be grateful. This was wintertime.

The air over the city was nothing like in the Weathers. In Arlathan, it was all so fueled with the decaying magic of the old floating castles in the sky and the pollution from the royal palaces and the locomotive trains that the clouds were very often translucent, especially in winter when the air was cold. Like jellyfish, squishing through the skyline in pinks and wet yellows, you could see their outlines, but it was sudsy, and the snow would fall in beautiful flakes the size of a newborn’s palm. Winter was beautiful in Arlathan, but it was tainted. Magic and nature are not always one and the same, and sometimes it got all wound up, and the city streets became toxic, and the snow could burn or whisper death wishes in your ear. The sanitation department had their hands full, and they spent half their winter days in the steam plow machines, moving up and down the streets sucking the poison snow out of the gutters.

That morning, Solas and Ghil woke up in one of the old floating castles that lingered on the cusp of space itself, floating high in the air above Arlathan. They had spent the night there, on a mattress that Ghil had spun of hay and silk, like they did every so often when the hour got late—a place they had come to call their own. Solas, in all of his weird magics, had figured out how to jury-rig wormholes in space. With the right math, plus his magic, he could open a door from just about anywhere that lead right into the main halls of this very castle, and he only ever took Ghil, and he was the only living soul who could do this—who could unleash this kind of fuckery onto the physics of the world, fold it in on itself and make it bend to his will. It was his ancestors who had built those castles in the sky 1,000 years before, and finally, they were being put to use again. Whether it was _good_ use—a secret hideaway for a couple of nineteen-year-olds in very raw, earned love—that is up to you.

In any case, that morning, they were sitting on the bed, drinking coffee out of ceramic mugs, looking out the window at the snow from way up high. The glass was frozen, covered with ice, and they’d had to build a fire to keep warm. Ghil had made a flower crown for Solas, but he had yet to put it on—a wreath of red ilex and sand daisies that she’d put together as more or less a joke, but it was beautiful, and he had told her so, but with his bald head it was such a statement as to make her laugh. So he left it sitting on the nightstand, next to a wooden menagerie of animals that Ghil had wittled out of a tree trunk.

“Did you hear about that woman who got caught cheating on her husband with one of the caddies at the golf course?” said Ghil. She was braiding her long, blond hair over her shoulder, wearing a gray long-sleeved shirt that had once belonged to Solas. “She’s being sued.”

Solas gaver her a look. “What for?” he said. He’d been doodling something in charcoal, in a sketchbook—some sort of halla, only it had six eyes instead of two.

“She and her lover broke like four specialty ice sculptures,” she said. “There was a wedding going on.”

Solas smirked. “One of your mother’s weddings, I presume?”

“My mother’s lawyers are like vipers.”

“That is the least of this woman’s problems,” said Solas, sipping from his mug. He tossed the sketchbook to the floor. “Do you know the husband?”

“No,” said Ghil. “I think he like, works at one of the banks in the Finery District. He’s probably cheating on her, too.”

“That would be typical,” said Solas.

Outside, the dawn had cleared, and the sky was red with sun and snow. “What are you doing today?” she said.

“Heading home,” said Solas. “I have some things to do around the house. I’ll be back in the city around nine.”

“I am making flower arrangements for a wedding at four,” said Ghil. “But after that, nothing.”

“Where is the wedding?”

“In the Wind District,” she said. “The Arboretum.”

“They need flower arrangements in an arboretum?”

Ghil shrugged. She leaned back on the bed, snagged the little silver case out of the drawer in the nightstand. From it, she drew one slender joint of elfroot and lit it with a bit of flame from the palm of her hand. “Apparently.” She took a hit, exhaled. “These are not rational people, Solas.”

“Trust me, I know.”

“You can meet me after,” she said, self-deprecating. She shrugged, smoked, looking down at her hands. “If you can.”

Solas sort of gazed at her, a long, careful look. She was pretty that morning, red-cheeked with her freckles. She was always pretty, but that morning, she seemed extra awake. Like she’d gotten better sleep than usual. He reached a little to lift her chin, get a better look at her. She didn’t like a lot of eye contact. She was self-conscious. He had to initiate, and so he did. “I’ll be at the Pale Dreaming,” he said. “Just come find me when you’re done.”

She blushed, took a hit. “I will.” She handed him the joint.

He grabbed her face and kissed her hard on the temple, and then he smoked a huge lungful of smoke and released it into the air with nonchalance. He sat smoking, finished the joint, while she picked at her nails and looked out the window at the falling snow. At some point, he reached for the flower crown. He put it on her head. She looked like one of the spirits who hung out by the sea, with fins and wings, telling fortunes, always sharing its compassion.

“You’re a vision,” he said, smirking.

She swatted his hand away. “This is supposed to be yours,” she said.

“I’m bald,” he said. “There is nothing redeeming about a bald man in a flower crown.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” said Ghil. She put her chin in her hands and looked up at him, the loose blond hair falling around her face in pieces. “It all suits you, Solas.”

He studied her then, how she was always a little nervous, a little worried about what he thought of her, or what he might do, how he might disappear. Though he never had, he feared he’d somehow made her think he might still. “Ghilan’nain,” he said.

“Yes?” she said.

He pushed the hair out of her face, tucked some of it up inside the flower crown. “We cannot keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Coming here,” he said. “To this place. The castle is falling apart. It needs restoration, which I cannot give it right now. It is not a home.”

She seemed disappointed. “I know that,” she said, biting off a hangnail. “But what are we supposed to do?”

He sighed. He slid around behind her, very easy. She settled with her back against his broad chest, his chin on her shoulder. He was so tall, so big, she thought. At some point, he had become a man, and in so doing, became hers. He laced their fingers together. Outside, the winter falcons began to screech their handsome melody. They were huge birds who nested in the castle towers. They tolerated Solas and Ghilan’nain, because Ghilan’nain had convinced them of a truce—she was very good at this. “We need a place,” he said.

“I know,” said Ghil. “But we can’t afford to live in the city, unless you want to knock over a liquor store, or get an apartment in one of the ghettos.”

“I don’t want to live in the city,” said Solas. “And I don’t think you do either.”

“Not really,” said Ghil. “There are too many people here. It’s a gross hive.”

“You know my mother’s property is more than ten acres. It’s massive. My father always meant to add onto the house. By now, most of what there is, she lets go feral for a great deal of the year. She likes to farm, but she is only one woman.”

“Your point being?”

“I could build us something,” he said. “Nothing fancy, but respectable. A house. Far enough away so that we don’t feel her presence, but close enough to be…close. Does that make sense?”

Ghil paused, turned around to face him. One of the little red ilex berries from the flower crown had dipped down over her eye. He nudged it away, smiled. She stared at him hard like she didn’t understand. She was surprised, that much was for certain, her hazel eyes like little gardens. “You want to build us a house?” she said. “All by yourself?”

“Not by myself,” said Solas. “I have some friends who would help out, and a couple of uncles who would sell me the resources for next to nothing. My mother never calls on them, because she’s too proud to ask for help, but I know they’d give me a hand if I asked.”

“Solas,” she said.

“What?” he said. “It’s just an idea, Ghil. You don’t have to like it.”

“It sounds like you’ve given it a lot of thought,” she said. She took his hands, studied the battered, scarred knuckles. They were healed now, mostly.

“I have.”

“I just—I’m surprised.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said. “You’re always so…one foot out the door. You know? Very _Solas._ ”

Solas sighed, huge. Only he knew what this meant. He put the yellow hair behind her ear and smiled very earnest. He smelled good, and he was very cute there, in the cold, giving light from the sun, wanting her. “Not anymore,” he said. “I like us.”

“Me, too,” she said, fawning a little, but fully aware. She knew how hard she fell every time he looked at her like that. It had used to embarrass her, but now, she just gathered her courage, picked up the flower crown off her head and placed it on his. “Build a house for us,” she said. “Solas.”

He smirked. “Very good.” He reached up then, to adjust the crown at the top of his head. “How do I look?”

“Handsome,” she said.

“Yes well, to you I am always handsome.”

She shoved him in the shoulder and kissed him on the lips. He picked up her braid between two fingers. But that is when they heard one of the winter falcons screeching in the belfry overhead, an unforeseen volume. Almost threatening. They both looked up to the ceiling, watching for the source, but there was nothing.

“What was that about?” said Solas.

“I don’t know,” said Ghil. She shrugged.

While Solas poked a pin through the space-time continuum, she made friends with all the animals in all the land to share their nests. Together, they were better. Together, they had more fun.

Solas and Ghil waited a little while before going home. The snow seemed to be sticking to the windows so thick by now, you could hardly see through, and yet the sun was melting it off the glass, and the fire crackled on the other side of the dilapidated room with the dusty curtains, and Solas and Ghil were warm up there, way up high in the sky, over it all. The falcon kept making its wary omen noise, every once in a while, like a warning from the corner of the tower, in protection of its young, perhaps, and its big nest full of white, pebbled eggs. They tried to pay it no heed.

If they didn’t know any better, they’d have thought somebody was knocking, that somebody was waiting at their door. But there were no doors here. Only wormholes. The cityscape could not pollute them from up here. They could see all the rooftops where they’d used to smoke—the train yard, the palaces in the hills with the parties and the Ring. They could measure them all with their eyes as they sat, looking out their icy window with all of their purity in winter.


End file.
